What happened when a bike company started putting TVs on the sides of its delivery packages

A cycling company that was seeing a high number of its bikes getting damaged during deliveries has seemingly solved the problem by making a simple change: printing a flatscreen television screen on the boxes.

By masking its bikes as TVs, VanMoof, a Dutch manufacturer that exports bikes to customers overseas, has seen the damages reduced by 70-80 per cent.

We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 USD 0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.

Taco Carlier, the co-founder of VanMoof, told The Independent: “We came up by the idea because we had lots of damage, especially with shipments in the USA.

“In the end our whole store in Brooklyn was filled up with refurbished bikes that were damaged on shipments and we had to sell them with a discount.

“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.”

Creative director of the company, Bex Rad, revealed the solution in a blog post titled “Our secret’s out”, in which she said the company had to take action to reduce the damages in order to meet an ambitious target to increase online sales.

Ms Rad wrote: “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. 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.

Shape Created with Sketch. Top 20 most bicycle-friendly cities Show all 20 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Top 20 most bicycle-friendly cities 1/20 1. Copenhagen, Denmark Creative Commons 2/20 2. Amsterdam, Netherlands Getty 3/20 3. Utrecht, Netherlands Getty 4/20 4. Strasbourg, France Getty 5/20 5. Eindhoven, Netherlands Creative Commons 6/20 6. Malmo, Sweden Creative Commons 7/20 7. Nantes, France Creative Commons 8/20 8. Bordeaux, France Creative Commons 9/20 9. Antwerp, Belgium Creative Commons 10/20 10. Seville, Spain Creative Commons 11/20 11. Barcelona, Spain Creative Commons 12/20 12. Berlin, Germany Getty 13/20 13. Ljubljana, Slovenia Creative Commons 14/20 14. Buenos Aires, Argentina Getty 15/20 15. Dublin, Ireland Creative Commons 16/20 16. Vienna, Austria Creative Commons 17/20 17. Paris, France Getty 18/20 18. Minneapolis, USA Creative Commons 19/20 19. Hamburg, Germany Creative Commons 20/20 20. Montreal, Canada

“With a big hairy goal to sell 90 per cent of our bikes online by 2020, we had to find a fix.”

While VanMoof had initially hoped to keep the solution a secret, it announced it publicly in a Facebook post after it was leaked on Twitter. In the post the company wrote: “Here at VanMoof HQ we’re all about making tiny hacks that have a huge impact.”

The news provoked a positive reaction online, with people describing the idea as “brilliant” and “insanely clever”.

We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.

At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.