Inhabitat: This Bamboo Bicycle Kit Comes to You in the Mail

“If regular bikes aren’t quite sustainable enough for you, this bamboo bike kit could be the answer. The Bamboo Bicycle Club, which started as a bike-building workshop in London, now creates mail-order kits, complete with all the parts needed to build a bamboo bike frame at home.” — Inhabitat, May 2015

Inhabitat — one of the world’s leading green design and innovation publications, with 14 million+ monthly readers — covered the launch of BBC’s mail-order home-build kit in May 2015. This was the first major international coverage of the kit concept, less than six months after the kit shipped for the first time. Inhabitat’s green design audience — people who actively seek sustainable alternatives to conventional products — represented the precise early adopter market for BBC’s mail-order kit.

The kit that Inhabitat covered in May 2015 was a significant product evolution from the original BBC workshop experience. The workshop required participants to travel to Hackney Wick for a weekend; the kit brought the workshop to anyone, anywhere. For the 70% of BBC’s kit customers who live outside the UK, Inhabitat’s May 2015 feature was the first time they encountered the concept — a BBC bamboo frame built in their garage, from a kit that arrived in the post.

The kit at launch

The 2015 kit included all materials required to build a bamboo bicycle frame at home: Guadua bamboo tubes (pre-cut and notched), hemp binding, bio-resin, and full instructions. The build process took considerably longer than today’s easy-build kit — the original kit required 70–80 hours of work, using traditional hemp-and-epoxy lug construction. For Inhabitat’s audience, who understood that sustainable products often require more investment of time and care than their conventional alternatives, this was not a deterrent. It was the point.

“The kit has been in development for three years and now the newly-perfected version is ready to launch, letting you create your own ride no matter where you live. London based Bamboo Bicycle Club is an organisation that teaches people how to engage their hands and rework a raw material by providing bamboo bike building opportunities through guided weekend workshops.” — Inhabitat, May 2015

Three years of kit development

Inhabitat’s observation that the kit had been “in development for three years” places its launch in precise historical context. BBC launched its first workshop in September 2012. The company spent the following three years developing, testing, and refining the kit format — working out how to pre-cut and pre-notch bamboo tubes to standard specifications, how to package hemp and resin safely for international shipping, and how to document the construction process clearly enough for an unsupervised home builder to follow.

The kit that launched in 2015 was not a quick product extension. It was three years of product development documented in a 70-word Inhabitat description. The “newly-perfected version” Inhabitat described had been tested in the BBC workshop on hundreds of workshop participants before it was packaged for unsupported home building. By the time Inhabitat covered its launch, BBC could be confident that any reasonably patient person could build a rideable bamboo frame from the kit — not because the instructions were simple, but because every failure mode had been identified and resolved in the preceding three years.

International reach, day one

Inhabitat’s May 2015 feature introduced the BBC mail-order kit to a global audience on its first day of coverage. Within weeks, kit orders had arrived from North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia — the international distribution that now accounts for the majority of BBC’s kit revenue. The Inhabitat feature was the match that lit the international business.

Read the full article on Inhabitat →