Why We Don’t Have a Warehouse Full of Bikes

If you’ve been thinking about getting a Christiania bike for back-to-school, you may have noticed we’re REALLY low on bikes.

Usually this time of year, we like to have a good little bump of inventory ready for back-to-school. But this year, we held back a bit on our orders. A large part of that was the changing tariff situation, and part of it was that Christiania has been making some really lovely changes to the bikes. With so much uncertainty around costs and importing, we wanted to be a little more cautious about ordering too far ahead. And now, well… we're feeling it. We’re REALLY low.

So why does it take so long to get more?

Christiania bikes are made in Denmark by a crew of people, with each person responsible for a specific part of the bike. We've visited the factory and met the people who make them, which makes the whole process feel a lot more personal. These aren't bikes coming off some giant anonymous assembly line. And the factory is always busy making bikes!

Once a bike is finished, it's picked up at the factory in Denmark and loaded onto a ship headed across the Atlantic. The ocean trip can take roughly 4–6 weeks, depending on the sailing and route. Then the bikes arrive in the U.S. and make their way through the port and Customs before we can get our hands on them.

And we're still not done. We unpack them, assemble them, check everything over, and get them ready for their new homes. If a bike is being shipped to a customer, it gets carefully loaded onto a pallet and sent on its next leg of the journey.

So when you order a Christiania, you're not ordering something that's been sitting in a giant warehouse waiting for someone to click “buy.” You're ordering a bike that has been made by people in Denmark, shipped across an ocean, cleared through customs, unpacked and assembled by us, and then sent on to you.

That's why, when we don't have a bike in stock, we generally say 3–6 months for a new order. There are a lot of steps between “I'd like that bike” and actually riding it home. So if you've been thinking about a Christiania place your order with all this in mind. It's a slower process in a world that has gotten very used to having everything tomorrow. A little less “click and have it tomorrow,” and a little more conscious consumerism. And if that means waiting a little longer for the right bike, we think it's worth it.