Spotted on FastCo’s design magazine, here’s the thing: how do you design packaging to protect its contents without spending more money on expensive protective materials?

The answer is… you don’t. You make use of an ingenious camouflage:

No matter who was doing the shipping, too many of our bikes arrived looking like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester,” writes (VanMoof creative director Bex) Rad. “It was getting expensive for us, and bloody annoying for our customers.

Given the box is almost the size and bulk of an expensive flat-screen, Rad had a tv-type icon added to the outer and it seems that the shipping company’s treat TVs with a lot more respect than (just as expensive) cycles, as since the design change,

shipping damage dropped by 70%-80%.

The thing is that even thought the secret’s now out, the behaviour’s stuck; so it goes to show that even a little deception (with a drop of good humour) can change how we approach our work.

Here’s the full story

and here’s the neat Van Hoof site.