"Our secret’s out"

September 25, 2016 7:47 PM

VanMoof had a logistics problem: too many of their bikes, beloved of hipsters and retro-fans, were being mangled during shipment. Their solution? It may surprise you.
posted by Pinback (52 comments total)

"Why don't they just make the whole plane out of cardboard boxes marked as flat screen TVs!?"
posted by gwint at 8:00 PM on September 25, 2016 [55 favorites]

I would have thought that in the Netherlands, they'd do better marking their flat-screen TVs with pictures of bicycles.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:09 PM on September 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

Relatedly: The Atheist Shoe labeling experiment
posted by Going To Maine at 8:09 PM on September 25, 2016 [40 favorites]

Why did this solution not involve an insurance company tearing their shipping partner a new orifice?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:56 PM on September 25, 2016 [10 favorites]

Looks like this is fancy Dutch bike maker vs Fedex - my guess is the legal department at fedex is larger than all of van moof, and would find the attempt cute.
posted by Dr Dracator at 9:38 PM on September 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Why did this solution not involve an insurance company tearing their shipping partner a new orifice?

Wouldn't it be easier to charge a relatively small customer more, than to cause problems for a relatively large shipping company?
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:47 PM on September 25, 2016

TheWhiteSkull, nah, that would just increase the rate at which the TVs got stolen.
posted by sldownard at 11:50 PM on September 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wonder whether this is just the subconscious assumption that bikes are less fragile than TVs, or a manifestation of societal hostility to cyclists-as-an-outgroup (sort of like the Atheist shoe thing), or a bit of both.
posted by acb at 2:07 AM on September 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

I read an interview with a rat catcher once who urged poison manufacturers to stop printing POISON on their products because he was convinced that big city rats had evolved to be able to read the word.
posted by Coda Tronca at 2:25 AM on September 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

Quite right. They should print DELICIOUS SWEETS on the side instead. What could possibly go wrong?
posted by Paul Slade at 2:35 AM on September 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

… big city rats had evolved to be able to read the word.

If pigeons can read, why not rats too?
posted by TedW at 2:35 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'd be curious whether the shipping damage mostly occurs in the U.S., and if so where. Because this sounds to me like it's not specifically the carrier's fault, it's a bunch of dockworkers and drivers each individually working out their hostility against cyclists by proxy.
posted by ardgedee at 2:39 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

It seems the Dutch have a history of solving problems by putting pictures on things.
posted by TedW at 2:52 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Customers complained that the atheist shoes kept arriving with no soles.
posted by Segundus at 3:01 AM on September 26, 2016 [39 favorites]

...and other were hole-y.
posted by wenestvedt at 3:05 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

It seems the Dutch have a history of solving problems by putting pictures on things.

That article mentions that pictures of honeybees were added to Victorian urinals to improve gentlemen's aim and hence reduce splash-back, but fails to explain why bees in particular were chosen for this job.

The answer lies in an obscure but rather erudite Victorian joke: the honeybee's genus is apis.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:18 AM on September 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

The answer lies in an obscure but rather erudite Victorian joke: the honeybee's genus is apis.

A manifestation of that most English humblebrag: demonstrating that one knows Latin. (See also: the 18th-century snobbery prohibiting splitting infinitives in English, or the one-word telegram from the Victorian general who captured Sind, reading “PECCAVI”.)
posted by acb at 3:21 AM on September 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

Actually:

Napier was supposed to have despatched to his superiors the short, notable message, "Peccavi", the Latin for "I have sinned" (which was a pun on I have Sindh). This pun appeared under the title 'Foreign Affairs' in Punch magazine on 18 May 1844. The true author of the pun was, however, Englishwoman Catherine Winkworth, who submitted it to Punch, which then printed it as a factual report

posted by Dr Dracator at 3:41 AM on September 26, 2016 [17 favorites]

Flat[screen]Pepsi[blue]
posted by Namlit at 5:51 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Relatedly: The Atheist Shoe labeling experiment

It's unclear to me whether their results were statistically significant. Probably, I guess? The results would be more interesting if they labelled the other half of the packages with "GOD IS GREAT".
posted by sfenders at 6:38 AM on September 26, 2016

The Atheist experiment is (intentionally or otherwise) a riff on one of Stanley Milgram's psychology experiments; he determined that one can measure public sympathy for an organisation or idea by leaving letters addressed to a PO box with the name referring to that organisation/idea lying around in public and counting what proportion are helpfully forwarded on (i.e., letters to a PO box held by Milgram got forwarded much more often when they were addressed to “Kitten Protection Society” than to “Friends of the Nazi Party”.)

Given that now there are embeddable battery-powered computers (think Arduino/Raspberry Pi) which can be fitted with accelerometers and SD cards and configured to log their journey, perhaps one could repeat this experiment with packages, measuring which ones cop the most abuse in transit.
posted by acb at 6:47 AM on September 26, 2016

Because this sounds to me like it's not specifically the carrier's fault, it's a bunch of dockworkers and drivers each individually working out their hostility against cyclists by proxy.

How would they have known that there were bikes in the packages? They weren't previously marked with pictures of bike, were they?

I don't see any evidence to imagine that people are smashing up bikes (which most people still buy for their kids, even if they don't like "cyclists") due to some American prejudice against cycling.
posted by howfar at 6:50 AM on September 26, 2016

I think it's less likely that there's hostility against cyclists as there is the assumption that bicycles can take more of a beating than flatscreen televisions. At least in the USA, most people hear "bicycle" and envision a steel-frame Huffy beater, not bespoke small-batch luxury pieces (or however one my categorize VanMoof cycles).
posted by Anonymous at 7:13 AM on September 26, 2016

Clever solution, but an ugly-ass bike. How did they know it was damaged?
posted by MrGuilt at 7:17 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'd really rather their business model involved shipping the bikes to local mom and pop bicycle shops, rather than 90% direct to consumer, but that's a different kettle.

It could be that FedEx et alia simply aren't cut out to provide bespoke shipping (without some trickery on the part of shippers).
posted by notyou at 7:25 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

The idea that this is targeted aggression assumes a lot of things about universal literacy/animosity toward cyclists that seem unlikely. Before jumping to any conclusions, I'd want to see pictures of the previous box. A lot of things are shipped in boxes like that, and lots of them aren't particularly fragile. I'd guess most packages just aren't treated particularly carefully.

If the packaging used to say "Twee Mustache-twirling Euro BIKE" in several languages, or more to the point had a picture of a bike on it, you might be able to infer something (even then there's a lot of room for correlation/causation misinterpretation). Otherwise the reasonable conjecture would be that people know what a TV looks like even in the abstract, they know it's expensive and fragile, and know they'll probably get chewed out if they keep breaking them.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:34 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

Maybe VanMoof's packaging is just really shitty. Printing a couple of graphics is probably cheaper than the labor involved in designing and assembling proper packaging for shipping.
posted by indubitable at 7:40 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

Didn't appreciate the clickbaity-ness of this post..

but what an ingenious solution to that problem.
posted by INFJ at 7:52 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

How would they have known that there were bikes in the packages? They weren't previously marked with pictures of bike, were they?

I don't see any evidence to imagine that people are smashing up bikes (which most people still buy for their kids, even if they don't like "cyclists") due to some American prejudice against cycling

I suspect this is a case of shippers being less than gentle with everything EXCEPT big screen TVs.
posted by thecjm at 8:36 AM on September 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

The nut of the problem is that a "bespoke" bike builder wants to ship it's products using the same mass shipping system that handles books and cans of peas and legal documents.

The right solution is to find a bespoke shipper that can properly handle a delicate, kind of big and heavy in its box bicycle.
posted by notyou at 8:48 AM on September 26, 2016

Clever solution, but an ugly-ass bike. How did they know it was damaged?

You shut your damn mouth !!
posted by humboldt32 at 9:12 AM on September 26, 2016

Much like any Dutch bicycle thread where someone notices no one is wearing helmets, this comment section has gone off the rails and lost sight of the spectacularness that is the Dutch.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:15 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Relatedly: The Atheist Shoe labeling experiment

Dear god: your followers are pathetic.
posted by maxwelton at 9:25 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Those atheist shoes are gorgeous. If I could afford that class of shoe, they'd get all my business.

(Do Christian shoes speak in tongues?)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:28 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Printing a couple of graphics is probably cheaper than the labor involved in designing and assembling proper packaging for shipping.

If so, it was a solid business decision.
posted by thedaniel at 9:31 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Big score for the bike company marketing team that devised this fake-ass story.
posted by glonous keming at 9:41 AM on September 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

Much like any Dutch bicycle thread where someone notices no one is wearing helmets

In Australia, they photoshop bike helmets into tourism ads for the Netherlands. Not sure if it's a legal requirement (advertising standards laws and the definition of reckless conduct) or just somebody CYAing.
posted by acb at 9:51 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is the hatred of bicyclists just an American thing though? I'd find it easy to believe that hating bicyclists would be a common part of the general conservative formula - exploiting the resentment of the working poor by directing their hostility against designated out groups / people who are more vulnerable in public spaces.
posted by idiopath at 11:09 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I mean I don't have a citation for this, but what I would expect is that the "grunts" hate bicycle riders everywhere, and in the US the difference is that the middle and upper classes hate them too.
posted by idiopath at 11:10 AM on September 26, 2016

It's not all that edifying watching MetaFilter try to work out what blue collar workers might possibly be thinking about cyclists as they're schlepping boxes.
posted by Coda Tronca at 11:26 AM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Does anyone own or have tried out these bikes?
posted by cell divide at 11:42 AM on September 26, 2016

Does anyone own or have tried out these bikes?

Yes, they're friggin' rad. If I had the cash and the balls to lock it up on the means streets of Amsterdam I'd totally buy one.

Of course they're not really this friggin' rad.
posted by humboldt32 at 11:51 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Having been a blue collar warehouse worker, can i ask that people stop with the asinine assumption that folks who work in shipping and receiving are out to smash up people's bikes?
posted by dazed_one at 11:59 AM on September 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

I'd expect warehouses/distribution centres to be run with military precision/maximum staff fuck-over now as well. So every item's journey will be linked by barcode to the guy who handled it etc.
posted by Coda Tronca at 12:04 PM on September 26, 2016

De gustibus, acb, de gustibus.
posted by Devonian at 1:04 PM on September 26, 2016

I mean, if nothing else, the people at the shipping company just don't care enough to take the time even if they hate cyclists.

First I would ask if the shippers have any requirement or information about what kind of stresses a package like that would be subject to.

If FedEx says that your package may be subjected to up to 4 foot drops or something like that and your packaging has been designed to withstand that and products are still getting damaged in shipping, then something is off, otherwise, we just can't know what the real issue is.
posted by VTX at 1:13 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

dazed_one: I spent years working in warehouses myself. What I'm saying isn't just speculation, it's based on working on the bottom rung of those environments in the US.
posted by idiopath at 1:22 PM on September 26, 2016

Of course they're not really this friggin' rad.

Oh man, I can't wait till April 1st! I might even get up at midnight, just like I did for the Apple Watch! I wonder what time zone they will be using; better start at GMT+2 just to be on the safe side.
posted by TedW at 1:38 PM on September 26, 2016

I spent years working in warehouses myself. What I'm saying isn't just speculation, it's based on working on the bottom rung of those environments in the US.

Just because you've worked with people who like smashing other people's goods doesn't mean you should tar an entire profession with that brush.
posted by dazed_one at 1:52 PM on September 26, 2016

I suspect that adding the graphic to the packaging might have an effect on the way some packages were handled, but my 30+ years in the transportation industry tells me the root cause of the problem was crappy packaging. That is, if there was a problem and this isn't simply a marketer's attempt at making the clever bike company seem all cleverish.
posted by Carbolic at 2:25 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Just mark 'em all "LIVE RADIOACTIVE RATS."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:22 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

"It's unclear to me whether their results were statistically significant. Probably, I guess? The results would be more interesting if they labelled the other half of the packages with "GOD IS GREAT"."

Yeah, I want to know if the alternative package had that strongly linear font with a word on it, because the USPS has a lot of guidelines about extraneous words on packages, ESPECIALLY if they're black and white, ESPECIALLY if they're barcodes or barcodey-looking. It's plausible that that tape was misread by the machine readers, hence the misdirection. A proper experiment would use the same font tape wrapped the same way, but some would say "JESUS RULES" and some would say "HAVE A NICE DAY" or whatever, and see if the tape is fucking up the machine reader, or if humans are delaying the packages. And/or signing the packages up for tracking to find out where the delays are.

Given how rarely humans handle packages in the USPS system until the end point (and how much more automated the USPS is than peer first-world postal systems), that's positing a LOT of delay at a local post office that is constantly being audited for just that kind of fuckery. (In fact I'm curious if Atheist Shoes contacted the postal inspectors, who love rooting out that sort of shit.)

Anyway shipping delays are shitty but I'm curious about the specific cause.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:51 PM on September 27, 2016