In Chilomoni Township, Malawi, a quiet revolution of enterprise creation is helping to end poverty for some of the world’s most vulnerable people. Since 2007 Krizevac Project (our parent charity) has worked hard to create viable social enterprises in a community hub known as Beehive. These businesses create training opportunities and meaningful jobs. To date 500 people who previously lived on less than £1 per day are in secure long-term employment. All of the money generated by the enterprises pays for children’s education and community family support. This helps to break the cycle of poverty and creates future Malawian business leaders.

One of our most successful enterprises is BeeBikes. Sponsorship from Mobal Communications Ltd, and the ‘buy one give one’ scheme has helped us to ship thousands of ex-postal Mailstar bikes to Malawi over the past six years. This African workshop employs eight local people to repair and service the donated bikes from Britain. They are then sold to Malawians who can travel to work, transport goods to market and travel miles to school or college. Bikes in Malawi can be life transforming and often mean an income for life. The profits from Beebikes funds care for pre-school children in our own Mother Teresa Children’s Center in the heart of the township.

For over a hundred years, the Royal Mail commissioned top-quality, British made bikes for posties delivering our mail. But the way we use postal services has changed: parcels are carried now far more than letters so bikes have become unsuitable and the Royal Mail gradually phased out their use. By 2010 the bikes were destined for landfill and we couldn’t let that happen! The Royal Mail very kindly donated their redundant bicycle fleet to us and we swiftly collected around 25,000 from around the UK. We’ve already shipped thousands of these sturdy cargo bikes to Chilomoni, Malawi, which left us with an allocation of somewhere between 4,000-5,000 in the UK to be professionally refurbished into Elephant Bikes. It’s hard to put a definitive number on how many Elephant Bikes we’ll make, due to the recycled nature of the process, making these individually numbered, fully refurbished postal bikes even more of a real collector’s piece.

During their time in service, the Royal Mail bikes were subject to a rigorous maintenance schedule. But a life of delivering the nations mail, meant that these bikes were more than ready for some TLC by the time they reached us!

We ensure your elephant bike is ready to ride from the moment you open the box, by undertaking a full refurbishment, just for you. It will still show signs of previous use, but it will give you the same years of reliable service as it gave to our posties. Once you’re on your bike, you’ll find it so easy to maintain! These incredible bikes were designed to be safe and reliable. Unlike most other bikes, they have drum brakes and hub gears, which means less time on maintenance and more time cycling!

A few of the bikes were sold by Beebikes in Malawi to Liwonde National Park; home to the majority of Malawi’s protected wildlife. The fence wardens were delighted with their ex-postal bikes and their new found ability to complete 30-mile patrols of the rhino fencing in record time. But it turns out that elephants don’t like red (think red rag to a bull…) and the wardens were at danger of being chased. Desperate to solve this problem, the wardens tried out some re-sprayed green bikes. Remarkably, the elephants no longer gave chase… and the first Elephant Bikes were born!

Every single bike is stripped down to its bare essentials. Some serious shot blasting comes next to remove the original red paint and any signs of rust. Now we can begin to fully transform it into an Elephant Bike, by powder coating it at a local firm in Stoke on Trent (right on the banks of the Trent and Mersey canal). The frame is then professionally coated in our three ‘house’ shades of green.

Once back at our Elephant Bike workshop (in a former pottery works in Longton, Stoke on Trent), our trained bike builders put your bike back together again. We use quality new parts where the original parts can’t be saved, but if the original postie’s bike bell still works, it stays on! Finally, your bike is professionally cleaned and ride-tested prior to despatch. We cannot eliminate every sign of its age or previous use, but your bike is thoroughly quality checked to make sure there is no remaining rust or obvious flaws. We also check that parts that are supposed to move, move smoothly and bits that are not supposed to move – don’t!