When Vanmoof started shipping bikes to the US, they experienced a high number of returns because the bike arrived damaged, despite there being warnings on the box to be careful. Rather than try to fix the US shipping industry’s practices, they did something very clever—they changed their packaging to make it look like it was a flat screen TV.
The US shipping industry has many years of experience delivering flat screen TVs as the demand for them skyrocketed since the early 2000’s. I can imagine the big retailers had significantly more pull with the likes of UPS, FedEex, and even the US Postal Service to reduce damages during deliveries.
By piggybacking off of years of safe flat screen TV delivery practices, Vanmoof’s shipping damages dropped by 70-80%.
Read VanMoof files for bankruptcy protection from the Pragmatic Engineer.