We’ve been getting some really fun images of people using their Yubas in exciting and unusual ways, so we thought we’d share them. If you have a great photo of someone doing something unusual with their bike, please send it to us!

This is the Davey Jones Deli Delivery Bike. Restauranteur David Jones uses the bike to cater outdoor events throughout Marin County; the electric assist makes it easy to get home.

Aaron N uses the Yuba Mundo and a Bikes at Work trailer to help one of his student

Crafter and jewelry maker Kaytea P. uses her bike to sell her wares on the street.

This guy uses his bike to take his Christmas tree home.

Cyclopsicle! - A home-made popsicle stand on a bike, based out of Tuscon, AZ!

Happy February! It’s been an uncharacteristically warm winter in many places, which is good for us cyclists, but also reminds us of one of the reasons why we have chosen to ditch the car in the first place. By riding our Yubas to school, the grocery store and work, we’re sharing our love with the world. We’re creating the future we want to live in, everyday.

Submit the photo on our Facebook page with a quick description of what’s going on. If you don’t dig Facebook, you can enter by emailing your photo to kaytea@yubaride.com.

Update: The photos have started to pour in. Here are the entries we have received so far. Don’t forget, the contest runs until the end of the month, so send us your pictures.

Late in the summer of 2008, we got a phone call from Joe Doebele in Portland. At the time we had just launched the Mundo v1 and had no accessories available. Joe’s vision was to offer quality cargo bikes at affordable prices to his community. Since that time, Yuba Bicycles and Joe Bike have been growing together, selling hundreds of Mundo Utility Bikes in Portland, Oregon. Now, at the start of 2012, Yuba offers two different Mundo models including an electric-assist version and over fifteen accessories. Joe Bike has grown too; this month, they will be tripling their floor space to accommodate the growth in the cargo bike market.

We caught up with Joe Doebele to find out what is the secret sauce behind the Joe Bike success.

Yuba Bikes: How many years have you been in business now?

Joe Doebele: A little over 3 years.

YB: I hear that you will be expanding in 2012, why is that?

JD: Cargo bikes are big. Our shop was small. It’s on probably the best shopping street in Portland, but it was only 600 sq ft and a lot of people could walk right past it without noticing. We needed more space for bikes, but we also wanted more space to hold events and classes, to host fundraisers, and most of all to give our employees and customers a little breathing room. Our staff were literally climbing under and over and around each other and the bikes. Whenever there were more than a few customers in the shop at once, none of them could really move.

YB: What is your most successful line?

JD: Yuba. Yuba was the first bike we sold, back in the fall of 2008, and we stuck with it, promoted it a lot, took it wherever we went. Now word of mouth has taken over. We’re the biggest Yuba dealer in the world. At schools, parents drop their kids off by bike, and it can be a Bakfiets, Big Dummy, XtraCycle, Mundo, Madsen, or whatever. There are a lot of impromptu test rides at schools. By the time people come into the store to buy one, they’ve already made up their mind. They already know the bike and how it rides and what the accessories are. So, starting a few months ago, people would just walk in and say they wanted a Mundo and didn’t need to test ride it. This means that the beginning is the hard part. Getting the bike in front of people is the hard part. It gets easier the more people see the bike in use in their own environment. It also helps that Yuba keeps improving the bike and has accessories that work well.

YB: What are the Mundo buyers like?

JD: Overwhelmingly, they’re young families. When we first started selling Mundos, we thought of it mostly for cargo, and in fact most people used it for that. But then parents took over. It’s mostly for transporting kids and their stuff, and groceries. Also surprising to us is that it’s the moms more than the dads who ride the Mundo, but that’s been true of all the cargo bikes we’ve sold.

YB: What is the average sales ticket?

JD: $1600.

YB: Selling that many Mundos, what is the secret to closing sales?

JD: Our ethos doesn’t include the concept of “closing” a sale. We don’t use sales people and we don’t give commissions or bonuses. All of our staff are mechanics, and all of our mechanics know and love the Mundo, even though they’re not the simplest bikes to assemble. Most own one; one owns three (a V1, a V2, and a V3). Instead of “selling”, they just tell it like it is, suggest that people try as many cargo bikes as they can, and answer people’s questions. And, as I said above, increasingly people know the bike beforehand from other parents at school, so they just come in and buy one.

YB: What would you tell bike dealers to do to achieve your success with the Mundo?

JD: If cargo bikes are still new in your town, it’s probably essential to create some awareness and momentum by working with schools and showing up at events like farmer’s markets, maybe creating your own events, and of course using the internet in conjunction before and after. Shops that focus on road or mountain bikes tend to have a harder time selling cargo bikes. Shops that make a commitment to this kind of bike and really get to know them will do better. But in any case it’s probably safe to say you can’t just stock the bikes and expect them to move. You have to become a bit of an activist.

Joe Doebele is the owner of Joe Bike in Portland joe-bike.com

Bay Area Bike Rentals will be offering people demo rides on a Yuba Mundo to help them get their groceries home from the Jack London Square Farmer’s Market. The demo program will start February 12, 2012, and continue every 2nd Sunday of the month through the summer.

For more information, please contact Bay Area Bike Rentals at (510) 836-2311. They are located at 427 Water Street  Oakland, CA 94607

The 2012 Go-Getter pannier bags are here, and I wanted to see how different they are than the old bags. Do they represent a significant design improvement, or does the new design merely represent a few minor tweaks to an already solid workhorse?

Mundo vs. Prius - how green is your errand running really?

I decided the best thing to do was to put both bags on my bike and run some errands so I could compare apples to apples. Unfortunately, my errands took me along a busy street with a significant amount of car, truck and bus traffic (and no bike lane or alternate bike route – thank you very much city planning department!). Weaving around double-parked beer trucks into the lane of speeding cars, I immediately noticed that the new Go-Getter is significantly more svelte than the the old one, a feature that came in handy when quickly dodging The City’s “Death Monsters”.

Stop one was picking up a few at the ceramics studio. I didn’t want to be the bull-in-the-china-shop knocking everything down with the bag, so I left the bags on my bike outside and tucked the paper-wrapped bowls securely into the old Go-Getter when I came out. (Sorry doom-Sayers at the studio, not a single one of them broke on the way home!)

I had heard that the new Go-Getter was designed to easily clip on and off the Yuba Mundo frame so that the bag can be taken into the grocery store, eliminating the need for cloth hippy bags.  As promised, the bag was easy to maneuver on and off the bike’s frame with the nifty new clips.

I attached the shoulder strap and was on my way for some carbon-free grocery shopping. The Go-Getter bag is huge and a bit unwieldy, even for someone as tall (5’8″ or 170cm) and broad-shouldered as I am. There is absolutely no way I could maneuver a bag this large through the cramped Asian market I normally shop at, so it was a good thing I had decided to hit up the local hippie mart.

I wanted to see if I could figure out a way to avoid whacking everyone in the store with my super-sized pannier, and discovered that the Velcro straps will hold the Go-Getter nicely to mini grocery carts.

Since I was planning to make a “light lunch” for my household, I got:

• quart of milk
• two bottles of wine
• quart of orange juice
• two pounds of spinach
• two pounds mushrooms
• three eggplants
• couple of pounds of pasta
• four pounds of onions
• cheese

Hardly a big grocery run for a cargo bike rider, but it did allow me to test out the new Go-Getter under load (in case you are wondering: I was making vegan/vegetarian lasagne).

Of course everything fit smoothly into the bag. The divider kept the heavy liquid items away from the delicate and easily-squished vegetables. The addition of the internal strap really helped the bag to keep its shape as it got loaded, and its enhanced stiffness made it easier to heft up to my shoulder and lug out of the store.

Somewhat surprisingly, getting the heavy bag back onto the rack of my Mundo was a complete breeze – I had imagined it smashing my fingers while wrestling it on to the rack like the old bag does. One of the reasons why I seldom remove my old Go-Getter from my bike is that it can be challenging to get all the clips to line up and snap it back on to the rack; this problem has been completely eliminated with the new design.

A quick ride home, and then the final test for the new Go-Getter: how would it compare to the old Go-Getter getting down the narrow, refuse can filled hallway to our bike room? Again, the rigidity, and general lack of slump kept it away from the walls and the random nails sticking out of them. It managed to squeeze around our mighty recycling bin just fine, without getting stuck on the wall like the other bag.

I even carried it upstairs full of groceries and unloaded it in the kitchen – a testament to how much I like the new functionality.

Conclusion:

All in all, a solid redesign of a great product. The functionality is improved by at least 50%.

Last fall, Yuba Bicycles partnered with Level Ground Trading to donate six Yuba Mundos to the HOPE Project in Tanzania. The HOPE Project works with coffee farming collectives to leverage the power of direct fair trade to improve lives. In Ileje, Tanzania they have helped farmers collectively purchase coffee cleaning and processing equipment, which has enabled farmers to earn market rates for their organic coffees.

The bikes arrived in Ileje on December 22, and the members of the coffee co-op started using them right away.

Before sending the bikes to Africa, Level Ground tested a Yuba Mundo under load at their facility in Canada and made this short video:

If you want to support the coffee collective, you can purchase their coffee directly from Level Ground.

The new Bread Baskets and 2012 Go-Getters arrived today, and boy, are we excited. Here’s a “Bread Basket Cam” video of our super-rockstar parking lot.

Toby L., Yuba’s warehouse guy just got married and he sent us these photos of his wedding in Truckee, CA.

Image courtesy of the Urban Simplicity blog.

A guide to getting you and your delicacies to the supper by bike without mishap.

If you’re not packing your loved ones into the car and torturing yourselves with a car trip in stop-and-go traffic on the “expressway”, you should consider a superior form of transportation this Thanksgiving weekend – bicycles. Bikes are a natural fit for Thanksgiving. They eliminate the stresses of fighting for parking at the grocery store or farmers market, not to mention that riding home from Thanksgiving dinner is the perfect way to wake up from a food coma.

Shopping Tips

Anyone that uses a bike regularly for their shopping trips knows that you need a system to transport your food home from the market.

If you’re young and hip enough to define dinner as a 12 pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Veggie Surprise, all you will need to do your shopping is a backpack or messenger bag. Those of you with more sophisticated epicurean tastes will need a more advanced system to transport your goodies home, such as a bike rack with panniers. If you’re hosting the big Thanksgiving shindig, your best bet is a cargo bike: groceries can be packed into the panniers, cases of wine and seltzer can be strapped to the rack.

If you’re new to shopping by bike, the method of packing grocery bags is slightly more precise than when shopping by car. Solid things – frozen butter, rice, cans etc. – go at the bottom of the bag. The middle layer should comprise of durable, but slightly more delicate things: flour, root vegetables and frozen meats. The top layer should contain the most delicate items such as tomatoes and eggs. When you load up your panniers or backpack, make sure you don’t squish the delicate things on top with the fastener system.

Pro-Style Potlucking

Now that you’ve gotten all your food home and made some delicious family recipe to take to the supper, how do you get it there by bike without making a mess and spilling the bisque all over your ball gown?

Carefully consider the food item you are bringing. Does it need to be kept hot? How much liquid and grease does it contain? Can it be assembled at the party?

Some things, such as salads and snack trays are fairly straightforward to transport on a bike. Prepare all the ingredients at home in small containers or bags, and then assemble them at your friends’ house. A tray of pre-cooked stuffing or sweet potatoes is easy enough to cover in tinfoil and  stick into a pannier. Other things, such as pumpkin soup or meatballs, are more challenging because they need to stay warmish and have potential to leak and make a big mess. Cook these type of foods in a dutch oven or other heavy lidded pot. When you are done cooking, let the pan cool until it’s warm to the touch. Use 2” wide masking tape to tape the lid on the pot for transportation. Clear packing tape will work too, but sometimes it leaves a residue on the pot. Ideally, everyone will love your dish, so you can wash the container and bring it home clean.

It may seem counterintuitive, but yogurt containers aren’t ideal for transporting liquids by bike. Their lids always come off at the most inopportune moments. If you’re transporting something with real spill potential and you don’t like the idea of transporting it in the pot, mason jars are the a sure-fire way to prevent spills.

Before loading your bag or pannier, take a quick look in there. Is there anything that would be a pain to clean if there’s a leak? Take it out and give the bag a quick rinse to make it clean for the food.

We here at Yuba Bikes hope that you and your family have a healthy and safe Thanksgiving.

This article was originally published in Triple Pundit, an online magazine about sustainability and business.