DKNY Guerilla Marketing Goes from Poor Taste to Trash, by John Del Signore at Gothamist:
Curious about the fate of all those orange bikes with the DKNY website that were locked up around town? The ones the police didn”™t cart away (some were illegally chained to trees) are being picked clean for spare parts. The tone deaf Fashion Week publicity stunt was presented by DKNY as an effort to promote cycling in New York, and the company did help raise awareness by, uh, distributing bicycle maps in their stores. Oh, and their website for the campaign has a photo of models riding a bike, though they”™re too cool for helmets, of course.
The neon orange DKNY bikes drew heat from cyclists because the aesthetic is all-too-similar to the nationwide “Ghost Bike” campaign, which memorializes killed cyclists by locking an all-white bicycle near the scene of the accident. In an email sent out earlier, a DKNY rep wrote “we are very sorry if our well-intentioned “˜Explore Your City”™ program offended anyone.” That’s touching, but ‘sorry’ doesn’t get these eyesores off the sidewalks.
DKNY has not responded to our questions about when the bikes will be removed, but it seems others are doing the job one piece at a time.