In 2015, Amsterdam-based e-bike company VanMoof started shipping to the United States but found that a disproportionate number of them were damaged during shipping. So they started putting the bikes in fake flatscreen TV boxes. From VanMoof:

That small tweak had an outsized impact. Overnight our shipping damages dropped by 70-80%. We sell 80% of our bicycles online, which means we still print TVs on our boxes. More than 60,000 of them have now been shipped directly to our riders worldwide.

Now other bike companies do it too:

View this post on Instagram

Strength through progress - hundreds of MATE. ready and packed every week! ? #matebike

A post shared by MATE.BIKE (@mate.bike) on Apr 1, 2017 at 1:57pm PDT

(via Kottke) Read the rest

Quantcast just released statistics that confirm what we've known all along: Boing Boing readers are super-smart, ranking among the top 25 "highest percentage of web traffic with higher education." Read the rest