Recently, Last Mile Leeds has been taking on a new revenue stream, with bulk distribution of magazines across the city centre.

We were first approached by ‘The Professional’ magazine to distribute their inaugural issue to every office premises we could find!  Over the space of four days we delivered 60 boxes of magazines (totalling about 9000 copies) to 557 office premises across the city. Our knowledge of Leeds certainly helped, as we had both familiarity with most of the offices and relationship with many receptionists and concierges. Nevertheless, we also found new pockets of offices of which we had been previously unaware. I genuinely feel that no other company could have provided the service that Last Mile Leeds was able to offer.

Our Bellabikes proved invaluable for this sort of work. Not having to ‘park’ the trike on a stand every stop was a benefit, and their additional capacity compared to our Bullitts meant that we could deliver for several hours between refills. Even fully laden with 24 boxes of magazines, the Bellas while slow could still cope with the steepest hills we came across, and their rear wheel steering gave great manoeuvrability.

The recommendation of this satisfied customer, provided us with our next job, delivering The Leeds List Student Guide. We had to deliver copies of this magazine to every retailer, café, restaurant and bar, in Leeds. In all we delivered to 800 premises in just about 3 days. This customer also wanted GPS tracking of all deliveries, which we were able to provide through the purchase of GPS trackers. More of that in another post.

Our most recent distribution job of The Leeds List Shopping Guide was a little different as it was bulk distribution from our Safestore depot, to about 50 distribution points in Leeds. The largest drop was 70 boxes, but the average only about 8. Nevertheless this would have meant a return to our depot every four drops.  We found the most efficient way was to deliver from a rolling hub. We drove large volumes of the magazines to particular drop off points, and then used these centres as hubs from which the bikes worked. We used both our Bellas and the Bullitts to do this. I confess to using the car more than I would have liked, but in fact came to the realisation that despite our fears that the sheer scale of this job would break us, we could have coped with considerably less recourse to motorised transport. Next time we will be more efficient and reduce the distance driven significantly.

Overall this has been a learning experience for Last Mile Leeds. We always knew that bikes could be used for far more than individual packets and parcels, and had been waiting for an opportunity to prove our capacity in this regard. This done, we are more than happy to talk to any other company facing their own delivery challenge within Leeds City Centre.