RVMS Blog: Welcome to Bike 2.0

I haven’t posted in awhile, partly out of laziness, and partly because the stream of comments still coming in about the Bike 2.0 manifesto. It’s great to get all this quality of response and feedback.

If you’re interested, the next couple of projects are:

• A 2-part, 2400-word  Bike 2.0-style guest commentary on The Future of Interbike over on Patrick Brady’s Red Kite Prayer. It’s been up for about a week, and it increased traffic to my humble industry blog by a factor of six. So if you haven’t read it, it may be worthy of your outcheckery.
• Follow-up Bike 2.0 post back here on RVMS on the Top Ten Lies We Tell ourselves In The (USA) Bike Industry. As the title suggest, it’s in ten parts, and I’ll probably upload a couple parts at a time for your delectation.
• And a couple of other projects I’m working on right now. Plus, of course, the normal work that clients pay me to do.

In the interim,  here’s something a little more fun, but which nonetheless speaks directly to the power of Bike 2.0 in the market. It’s a music video from the “experimental pop/tropical rave/corky rapping/alternative noise” girl-band out of Helsinki, Le Corps mince de Françoise (LCMDF for short). Checkitout below:

This is very cool— pretty good tune, too, in a sugary pop kind of way. But what’s remarkable to us cycling types is that these young, hip, fashionable women are riding bikes all over the nighttime city (Helsinki, presumably)…and that fact is considered completely unremarkable.

Compare and contrast with the USA, where every time some fifteen-minutes-of-fame faux celeb  throws a leg over a top tube, it’s a Media Event.

Partly this is because, although the band sings in English, the video takes place in Scandinavia, where—as in much of Europe, too—riding bicycles is just a regular part of people’s  lives, not something they need to put in the newspaper or blog about or even notice much. When riding a bike is really part of your culture, it’s like dial tone: you don’t even think about it. It’s just there.

The video also speaks volumes about the seamless integration of bicycles into both pop culture and women’s fashion. It’s just part of the story: the girls ride bikes to a disco, dance and perform in the same modestly stylish clothes they rode in with, and then ride home in the dawn. This is intercut with studio take where they’re all dolled up, dancing around and only pretending to ride bikes…which is kinda unreal, but there it is.

I love the fact that—during the live scenes, anyway—these girls can really ride. They sit well, saddle height is correct, arms and shoulders relaxed. There’s even a couple scenes where they overtake other young folks on bikes, ride together awhile, and then ride away. All the time they’re turning around, flirting and yakking the way folks that age do, having a great girls-just-wanna-have-fun time while holding their line (well, pretty much) through corners. Cleaner, in fact, than any number of club rides I could mention.

And the bikes themselves—although there are all kinds of others in the video—aren’t tricked out carbon racers or too-cool-for-school fixies with 16″ flat bars. They’re  Jopos, a ubiquitous mid-60’s Finnish design recently resurrected by manufacturer Helkama.

Jopos are sort of the ultimate bike-as-dial-tone design, in some ways even more so than the classic Dutch utility bike:  one gear, kickstand, luggage carrier, enclosed drivetrain and integrated lock. They’re also utterly unpretentious, in the same fun sort of way as the Volkswagen Beetle, which is one reason they’re considered a classic bit of Finnish design. The new version is selling all over Scandinavia and Europe for  €379, or US$561 (just about $600 for our Canadian friends), so they ain’t cheap, either.

All of which makes Jopo a classic example of  Bike 2.0: a viable, highly profitable brand with a unique design concept set completely outside the standard industry business model—even on the other side of the Atlantic.

Did Jopo pay a placement fee or give away bikes to be in the video? Oh, probably. I don’t really  know and it’s not really the point.  What is the point is this:

To give you an idea of how popular Jopos are, they’ve only recently been re-introduced to the market and the Jopo Facebook page has some 4,645 fans. And it’s in freakin’ Finnish.

Trek, for comparison, has 5,144 fans as of this writing– just 11% more. Add in the English-language Jopo group of not quite a thousand, and Jopo’s Facebook presence is actually bigger than Trek’s…and more than half the size of the mighty Specialized Social Media juggernaut (although Specialized also boasts another 3,300 Spanish-language fans, including 300 diehards in Chile).

For the record, the population of Finland is less than 2% of the United States‘. So on a per capita basis, it’s not completely unreasonable to say Jopo’s  Facebook popularity in Finnish is 25X Specialized’s in English.

That’s a popular 2.0 bike. And it’s not even sold in North America.  Yet.