I was right about the money. I was wrong about who should pay for it.

Back when I was young, wild and free. Five months ago, that is.

Side note before I start, because it deserves one: OpenCargo is five months old. The first commit is dated Saturday 14 March. The first products went into the database on the Sunday, and on the Monday somebody clicked through to a maker's website. So yes, it really was a weekend project, and it turned into the thing I think about every day. I'll come back to the numbers at the end.

Anyway. In March I wrote How we choose which bikes get listed, and I set out the rule for which cargo bikes would get a page here. Reading it back, it does sound a bit petty, and I owe that reading to anyone who had it. I'm not taking the article down. What I'm writing now isn't a retraction, it's what five months of actually building the thing did to the idea. And the strange part is that what I meant back in March is more true today than it was then.

The line

Here is what I wrote:

The brand must be independent. That means founder-owned, privately held, not a subsidiary of a multinational holding company. If a private equity group or a conglomerate owns the brand, it doesn't fit our editorial line.

One idealistic line, huh?

Here is what was actually in my head. Do I want to help financial groups that pull out the moment things get hard? No. And when I say hard: a KKR-led consortium bought Accell Group in 2022 for 1.56 billion euros. KKR manages hundreds of billions. Hard times, but not for everyone.

That was my stance. It still is.

The book, quickly

One book shaped a lot of this for me over the past couple of years: The New Corporation: How "Good" Corporations Are Bad for Democracy, by Joel Bakan.

The argument, very short. Companies have become extremely good at sounding like they care, and none of it changed the single obligation they actually have, which is to the people who own them. So the good is real, and it lasts exactly as long as it pays. The day it stops paying it goes, and nobody has broken a single rule. That's not a villain story, it's a structure.

Which is also why I don't think the people inside these companies are the problem. Most of them believe in bikes. They just don't get the last word.

What's happening right now

If you follow this industry you already know. On 5 August, Accell's Dutch entities were granted a provisional suspension of payments after a takeover deal collapsed. On 11 August the Amsterdam court revoked that and declared them bankrupt, with two trustees appointed. Batavus, Koga, Sparta, Raleigh, Lapierre, Haibike, Ghost, Winora, Babboe and Carqon all sit under that group.

It isn't over. The trustees are trying to restart parts of the Dutch business, and a Dublin firm, Quanta Capital, has stepped forward as a possible buyer. But right now there are people who build bicycles for a living waiting to hear about their jobs. There are shops holding stock and warranty claims for brands whose parent company is in the hands of trustees. And at the end of that line there are riders, plenty of them on cargo bikes.

So no, I haven't changed my mind about the money. Watching this happen because of somebody's leveraged bet, rather than anything to do with bicycles, makes me angry in exactly the way it did in March.

But look at who my rule actually charged for it

Here's the part I got wrong.

My rule cost KKR nothing. KKR does not know this website exists.

Here is what it did cost. Studio Vollebak in the Netherlands makes five things that fit an Urban Arrow. CargobikeDecals in Germany makes three. Kattfix and Lockride make two each, and there are nine community designs on top of that. Twenty-one products, invisible here for months. Not because of anything those makers did. Because of who owns the bike they chose to build for.

Those are one and two person workshops. They are precisely who I built this for, and my principle was being paid for out of their pockets.

And then there's the rider. If you bought a Carqon, you didn't sign the KKR deal. You bought a cargo bike to move your kids around. This month you're reading the same headlines I am, wondering what it means for your warranty and your spare parts.

That is the exact moment an independent aftermarket matters most. Someone whose manufacturer is in trouble needs to know who else makes a rain cover, a lock mount, a seat for their bike. Hiding that from them because I disapprove of their bike's shareholders would be a second punishment, handed out by me, for a decision they had no part in.

I'm not doing that.

The name was the real argument

For a while I tried to have it both ways. Those brands weren't platforms with their own pages, they were "platform filters", so the makers could at least be found. It got messy in the back end, but the decision wasn't technical.

The decision was in the name I picked. OpenCargo.

I don't do this for the brands. I do it for people riding cargo because they want a better life. For the makers who imagine new things and then go and build them. For the person standing in a shop every day, convincing a future rider to spend a bit more and get the right thing instead of the cheap thing.

So I opened up. The rule now is counted rather than debated: a bike gets a page when it has a description, a photo, and at least three products from independent makers that fit it. Nobody votes on the brand. Fourteen of the 23 platforms in the database clear that bar today. The other nine aren't banned, there's just nothing worth putting on a page yet, and the day there is, the page appears on its own.

The second criterion from March survived untouched, and it turns out it was doing all the useful work anyway:

The bike must have an independent maker community. We're looking for platforms where other people are building things for it.

What's coming: I'm tagging the independent ones

I'm not throwing the March idea away. I'm moving it to where it belongs.

Over the coming weeks, every brand on OpenCargo gets an independence tag. Founder-owned and privately held on one side, owned by a group on the other, stated on the page, filterable when you browse, with a source and a date so you can check it yourself. When ownership changes, the tag changes, and that includes Bullitt.

Because the information was never the problem. Using it as a gate was. You should be able to see who owns the company behind your bike. You shouldn't need my permission to find a box for it.

What hasn't changed

The makers on this site are independent, as far as I know every single one. Mostly one and two person workshops. I say as far as I know on purpose, because I'm about to publish a tag that could prove me wrong about one of them, and if it does, the tag wins and I'll say so. That was always the real subject here anyway.

And the independence that matters most here is ours. No fees, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements, nobody paying to rank. Every maker gets the same page and the same link to their own shop, whether they build for a Bullitt or for a bike owned by a holding company.

I work at Larry vs Harry. I ride a Bullitt. That has always been the disclosure and it now cuts against me: my old rule happened to keep several of the Bullitt's competitors off this site. I don't believe that's why I wrote it. But I can't prove that to you, and a rule I can only defend by asking you to trust my motives is a bad rule.

So if you read the first article and thought I was being a bit dumb, I was a bit dumb. About as mature as the project was at that moment.

Five months in: 49 makers, 367 products, 13 countries, 23 platforms. Some of those brands are independent. Some are not. Soon you'll be able to see which, and decide for yourself what to do with it.

To the last five months, and to the next ones. Thanks for following along.

See every bike we index →

– Vince