Lavoie, the new owner of VanMoof, has announced its plans to bring the brand back to life, and back to the market.
Lavoie, an urban mobility brand founded by McLaren Applied, purchased the Dutch urban bike brand back in August shortly after it was declared bankrupt.
Now, the new owners have given some indication of what the future holds, with ambitious plans to return the brand to its former glory.
In a statement, co-CEOs Elliot Wertheimer and Albert Nassar said: “We’ve spent the last month working around the clock to understand what needs to be done at VanMoof in both the short term and the long term.
“We’ve been reassembling teams, reaching out to stakeholders across the world, and putting plans in place to build a sustainable but also crucially a viable operation going forwards. There’s a lot of work to do in a short space of time, but we want to do it right rather than quickly.”
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Lavoie has outlined three commitments: keep riders on the road, stay true to VanMoof’s innovative spirit, and deliver on reliability and communicate transparently.
In practical terms, their commitments point to three material changes.
Firstly, Lavoie want to make VanMoof bikes more reliable, by producing better quality components. Proprietary components became the Achilles heel of VanMoof – the bikes use all kinds of unique VanMoof-specific parts, but the quality of these parts was lacking, and the replacements were hard to come by.
Now, Wertheimer and Nassar say: “We’ll rebuild the supply chain and redesign and improve parts to make current models more robust and easier to fix. Our new products will be best in class and built to last.”
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Secondly, they want to make the bikes easier to repair by giving third-party bike shops the ability to service VanMoof bikes. This is a welcome step away from Tesla-style ‘vertical integration’, and one that will mean parts are more widely available, and more shops are able to fix the bikes.
Finally, they want to keep pushing on with innovation, and cement VanMoof as a “world-leading mobility brand”. VanMoof has some renowned designers and high-profile engineering backers, so they are in a good position to deliver on their aim to produce more “groundbreaking new products”.
The owners plan to recommence sales for VanMoof bikes “soon”, although given they also want to “do it right rather than quickly”, it seems unlikely that anyone will be getting a new VanMoof bike for Christmas.
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