DS Smith helps cyclists race from the Giro d’Italia to the Tour of California

Bob Malfliet is a cycling enthusiast when he is not busy as the General Manager of DS Smith’s Harelbeke facility in Belgium. Two years ago he was travelling with the Belgian Cycling Federation to the World Cup of Mountain Biking when those two worlds came together.

He was chatting with a team mechanic who bemoaned the difficulty they had in shipping bikes to the world’s top cycling events. They needed boxes that could get bikes safely and securely to the race, and back home, as opposed to the current boxes that were designed for one way travel only. Mechanics were forced to repair and tape together boxes for re-use – not an ideal scenario to protect a finely tuned bicycle worth thousands of euros. To add insult to injury, the boxes were frequently left on the tarmac at airports where they could get wet and become completely unusable and unable to protect the bikes.

Fortunately Bob had a solution. Using Akylux, a plastic, weatherproof product made by DS Smith, he designed a couple of reusable samples and sent them to the mechanic.

He didn’t hear anything for another year until a mechanic at QuickStep, who had seen the samples, called and asked for 20 boxes to protect their bikes being shipped to the world championships.

The world of cycling is a small one and word of Bob’s brilliant bike boxes started to spread.

Next up was Specialized, who wanted the boxes to protect the frames being sent to support their three professional teams. Last week it was cycling legend Rolf Aldag, now Performance Manager at South Africa’s Dimension Data team, on the phone asking about the boxes. But there was a catch. Rolf was calling on Monday from the Giro D’Italia that was kicking off in the Netherlands and he needed to have the boxes, with bikes safely stored inside, in the US the following week for the AMGEN Tour of California! To add to the complexity Thursday and Friday were a holiday in Belgium.

Undaunted, Bob got the boxes made by Wednesday, less than 48 hours later, and borrowing a van from his girlfriend made the drive to the Netherlands where they  were hand delivered to Dimension Data. A few days later those same DS Smith boxes were in California and ready to move onto the next race! When you’ve got the race of a lifetime it pays to have a Packaging Strategist on your side!