There's a mid-morning knock at my front door and I answer it to find a uniformed courier standing there, but with nothing in his hands or on the ground in front of him. “Olly Townsend?” he asks. “I have a delivery for you. I’ll just be a minute”. As I try desperately try to think what I have ordered recently, the courier heads back to his truck and returns a minute or so later with a large box with Canyon printed on the side. I have to restrain myself from doing a little jig on my front doorstep. I can imagine my neighbours looking out of the window and doing some mental eye rolling – has he bought another bike, they will likely be thinking. Well, yes and no. It is a new bike, but I’m only the temporary owner, rather than having bought it.
Unlike practically all of the other brands in the gravel cycling world, Canyon’s business model is to sell their bikes direct to the customer and as such, they don’t have a bricks-and-mortar dealer network to deal with the bike build and supply to the customer. Without having an experienced mechanic to build up each customer’s bike, Canyon have had to create a process whereby most of the heavy lifting has been done in their factory and the bike arrives at the customer’s door with only minimal assembly and pre-ride fettling required.
“Our bikes get delivered to the customer approximately 95% built” Dirk Dammert, Canyon’s global director of customer services told me. “The only exception are bikes in XL/XXL sizes which need the rear wheel and rear derailleur fitting, as they are delivered in a slightly different box due to the larger size”.
With some unseasonal sun beating down from a blue sky, I headed outside to my back yard to unpack and assemble my new bike.
In a former life, I managed a large bike fleet for a global adventure travel company and part of my role was to unpack and complete the Pre Delivery Inspection (PDI) on literally hundreds of different bikes from a number of well known brands. This meant I have pretty extensive experience of how bikes are delivered, what the packaging looks like and how smoothly the build process was likely to go.
From the minute I first looked at the box my new Grail gravel bike had been delivered in, it was obvious that Canyon had put a vast amount of thought into the delivery and build process. The first and most noticeable thing was the heavy-duty circular plastic clips which fixed the double layers of cardboard on the lid of the box. These had to be rotated which then allowed the lid of the box to be popped open. There were some strips of parcel tape too (for a belt-and-braces approach) but it differed hugely from the single-use industrial staples which most bike companies use to secure their boxes. The staples are a PITA to remove and often result in cuts to your hands as there seems to be always one which stays hidden, half buried in the cardboard. In comparison, twisting a plastic clip and slicing through a few bits of tape was a joy. Maybe I’m just easily pleased….
Once inside the box, it was equally obvious how much attention had been paid to the internal structure and the packing of the bike. The box had numerous reinforced cardboard sections which added both stiffness and rigidity to the box and protected the contents. At this point, you may well be saying “So what?! We don’t care about the cardboard, show us the bike…”.
The reason I’m banging on about this so much is that without a bike shop anywhere in the purchasing process, Canyon have had to make sure the bike arrives with you in pristine condition. We all know (and have probably witnessed first-hand) what a difficult (and poorly paid) job couriers have to do and this means your treasured new bike has most likely not had the smoothest ride from the factory to your doorstep. Poor packaging would result in potentially damaged bikes and a rubbish customer experience, so Canyon have tried to design out this potential problem.
The other pretty remarkable thing you notice is how little single-use plastic packaging material there is. The majority of the packaging material is cardboard. There is one large piece of reusable bubble wrap over the frame, but the rest are small pieces of thin foam sheeting and two heavy duty foam pads secured by Velcro. There’s very little sticky tape, no single-use zip ties and the vast majority of the packing materials could be recycled (or kept in the box and stored somewhere for future re-use). Anything that’s manufactured in a factory and then shipped to your door is likely to have a negative impact on the environment, but just by the simple measure of reducing the plastic packaging and making the remainder reusable and recyclable, that’s a step in the right direction.
This is what my Grail looked like once I had removed it from the box. It was surprisingly complete – the rear wheel and rear mech were fitted and both wheels had the disk rotors pre-fitted. There was even a smear of carbon paste already added to the seat tube. The only job I had to do as a home mechanic was to put together the handlebar/stem assembly, fit the seatpost/saddle, mount the front wheel and add on my pedals of choice.
All Canyon bikes come with a printed user manual and a QR code which links to the assembly and servicing information on the Canyon website. To further simplify the task, vital torque settings were printed on the different bolts that I was going to need to tighten. Incuded in the box is a basic torque wrench to enable customers to correctly tighten the small number of bolts that they are required to adjust themselves. Canyon bikes fitted with either front or front/rear shocks are also supplied with a shock pump.
Even with the relatively complicated looking “hover” bar that is the trademark feature of the Grail, the entire build time from first opening the box to taking the finished bike for a quick spin was an hour. And that included taking the photos for this story. Obviously, every purchaser of a Canyon will have different skill/experience/competency levels and so your milage may vary as the saying goes, but Canyon have done their best to make the system bombproof.
But what if something has gone wrong? You’ve opened the cardboard box and found something that looks more like an Airfix kit and less like a bike? “That’s where our network of global Service Partners would come into play” continued Dirk “In the event of a problem, customers can search the Canyon website and find their nearest service partner, who can deal with all aspects of service and warranty on Canyon’s behalf”. In the event that you don’t have a Canyon Service Partner close by, then after prior approval from Canyon’s multi-lingual customer service team, you can take your bike to a local bike shop and Canyon will reimburse you for the cost.
Luckily with my Grail, the attention to detail in the delivery process had paid off and beyond refitting a couple of rubber grommets which had jiggled loose and appropriately torquing up the stem, headset and seatpost bolts, the build process was a breeze.
Sadly, since my lucky window of sunshine during the unboxing and build up, winter has arrived with a bang near me and the rain bouncing off the floor outside my office isn’t inspiring me to go out and ride the new Grail just at the minute! However, I’ve ordered a set of mudguards and some winter tyres and as soon as they’re fitted and the Grail is nicely winterproofed, I’ll be heading out on the trails to test it out. Watch this space if you’d like to find out how I get on.