The Apprentice Features Eco Bike-Bag

apprentice bike pod photo
Image from BBC

Last week's episode of The Apprentice t.v. series featured the Bee3Pod bike bag, a well-designed bag for carrying groceries over the back wheel of a bicycle. It was the ecological choice for one of the teams--their assignment was to flog it to department stores. And they did: they sold a bunch to Heal's, an upmarket design store. Unfortunately they lost the competition but that's life in show biz.

The really exciting thing is that TreeHugger featured it last year! The inventor, Paul Thomas, was showing it as his graduate design project at the Royal College of Art and we saw it, liked it, and wrote it up.

bee3pod.photo
Image from Bee3Pod

Needless to say, Thomas is completely chuffed, as they say here, and who can blame him... Heal's really is looking to place an order and a major supermarket, name undisclosed, is also keen.

allan sugar fired.photo
Siralan; the UK's answer to Donald Trump. Image from The Daily Mail

Some of the buyers on t.v. complained that the design of the bag, hanging on one side of the wheel only, made the bike too lopsided... Thomas responds: "As for the lop sided thing, well, that's really not a problem, how many people do you see cycling with only one pannier, its no different, but of course, if you have an extremely heavy load, we would recommend that you have two POD's on either side of the rack, but for a normal shopping load, its really not a problem, we have used it many many times for shopping trips."

The design has advanced since our review last year. It can hold groceries, a computer, a suit for work, or a laptop. The bag itself functions as a good looking suitcase when it's not on the bicycle.

pod fall photo
Image from Bee3Pod