Disguising bikes as TVs to reduce damage during shipping was a genius move. But there be other huge benefits.
Sick and tired of their bikes being damaged while being delivered to customers, Dutch company VanMoof decided to put images of flat screen TVs on the boxes their bikes were shipped in.
The ingenious trick resulted in the merchandise being handled on its travels with much greater care, reducing damages by up to 80 per cent.
Those bikes being shipped from one of the company’s facilities in New York were suffering serious damage most often. And at one point an entire storage area was filled with broken bikes; either for fixing or beyond repair.
And while the simple step of printing TVs on the boxes seems to have done the trick, there has been an even bigger upside for the company.
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When they realised damage to their bikes had decreased and that people saw the trick of the TV box as interesting, they decided to go public with their story.
It was covered all over the work as a quirky little tale and such was the publicity that their sales have rocketed.
While the months between the end of the summer and December are generally their quietest in terms of bike sales, they’ve just experienced their busiest period ever.
And it’s all thanks to the publicity they received globally when the story of their TV boxes went viral.
“The awareness we got out of this story has been huge,” marketing manager Dave Shoemack told stickybottle.
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“If you type 'VanMoof' into Google trends, the last big spike you see is this story.
“We had our biggest ever months of sales on vanmoof.com in September and October as a result; these are traditionally quieter months.”
The company developed the strategy to print pictures of TVs on the side of their bike boxes after eight years of shipping resulted on constant damages no matter who their shipping partner was.
And with the goal of selling 90 per cent of their bikes online within the next four years, VanMoof simply had to sort the problem, or at least reduce damages to an absolute minimum.
“Since we started shipping bikes eight years ago, we’ve struggled to find shipping partners that give our bikes the same obsessive love and care that we do,” said creative director Bex Rad.
“Yet no matter who was doing the shipping, too many of our bikes arrived looking like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester. It was getting expensive for us, and bloody annoying for our customers.
“Our team sat together and we imagined that couriers would be more careful with packages if they knew even more precious goods were in them.
“As our boxes are exactly the size of a huge flatscreen television, we decided to print a television on them. It works great. In the USA damaged goods were even reduced by 70 to 80 per cent.”
The company was not planning to announce what it was doing, assuming of the word got out the impact of its TV box trick may be undermined.
But when a third party got a video of the boxes being loaded into a truck and shared it on Twitter VanMoof decided to take control of the message by announcing their simple but clever new tactic.
And in the couple of months since then they haven’t looked back in terms of lower damages and surging sales.
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