Bikes Used To Sell Everything

Bike in Brinkley's Food Store Window (Photo: Alex Goldmark)

(Transportation Nation) You can see tons of bikes this season in the progenitor of all urban bohemian neighborhoods -- Soho, New York City. And not just on the green bike lanes that cross the neighborhood.  They're in all the store windows. The uber-hip yet playful Barcelona-based shoe store Camper has one.

There's a klatch of them outside the trendy Soho Grand hotel.  The high-end purse and shoe store Kate Spade has a bike in the window, part of its wedding display (white dresses, white purses, white bike). In fact, Kate Spade is selling the bike this season -- for $1,100, to go with its $500 handbags and shoes.

"Even if she’s wearing a beautiful Kate Spade dress and high heeled shoes, she’s still going to get on her bike and go across town because she loves adventure and loves exploring and that’s just her spirit," Senior Vice President Kyle Andrew explains. "I think there's something in the air, people are definitely more interested in bike riding than ever before."

People are. As Mayors in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, DC, Los Angeles and elsewhere are adding thousands of miles of bike lanes, bike commuting rates are going up. And so is the status of a bike as an icon for hipness, urbanity, environmentalism, and just coolness.

(You can hear this story Friday evening, on Marketplace.)

Kate Spade Window Display (Photo: Andrea Bernstein)

Bike lanes, as you may have noted, have come under fire in some quarters of late. Ditto rude cyclists. But Sheron Davis of the advertising firm BBDO, says that doesn't matter to marketers. People may not like cyclists, they may be outraged at dangerous behaviors. But bikes, she says, are a universal positive. "It becomes part of a bigger story of one's life," she says.

Bikes have long appeared in advertising -- frequently in connection with retirement plans, or health care, or a product that wants to convey "wholesome family life."  But this is different.  It's bike to sell the super-hip.

CB2, the chic younger sibling of Crate and Barrel, is also selling a bike this season, which it's calling the Abuela (women's) or Abeulo (men's). With it's charcoal-gray frame, bright leather tires, and red leather seat, the bike nicely coordinates with CB2's red plates and orange sofas."

"We live in Chicago, and on our drive in -- because we do drive in," says CB2 Brand Director Marta Calle, laughing. "We have noticed our commute is getting longer and longer because the amount of people biking in the city is incredible."

Calle said the decision to sell a bike was clinched last year while she was at the Il Salone design conference in Milan, Italy. There were bikes everywhere, she says, city bikes, Dutch bikes, commuter bikes. "It was almost as if the city was promoting biking -- but it wasn't."

"And we thought what a cool trend. It speaks to our customer because our customer is young at heart."

It would seem to speak to a lot of customers for a lot of things this year.  Club Monaco is selling a bike. So are Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, and Brooklyn Industries. The Gap has a bike on its display floor.

Gap Store Display (Photo: Kate Hinds

This use of bikes to sell just about everything other than bikes this season shows that these retailers have more or less come to the same conclusion:  bikes can move  goods. Even when customers, like retiree Marty Shultz, who was browsing CB2 the other day, have no interest in buying a bike (he was looking for kitchen stools), the bikes convey a certain sense, as he put it, of "the modern."

Having all of these bikes everywhere is about motivating people to buy products, BBDO's Davis says, don't get it wrong. But she argues that all that marketing can end up promoting biking, not just shoes or sofas.

Until next year, when all these retailers discontinue their bikes, and move on to the next big thing.