Licence & royalties

Royalty. We reduce our development fee and are paid as the product sells, for an agreed term. You own the product and its design. This is the route for a brand that wants a development partner with a stake in the launch, without carrying the whole development cost up front.

Licence. When we keep the rights to an architecture — a fold, a mechanism, a platform that carries several products — we license it to you and are paid when the product sells. You get an architecture developed for exactly that use; we stay involved as the product family grows.

Both routes can end in a buy-out: you take over the rights outright and the product carries on under your name.

• It fits when the product will ship in numbers: components fitted across a bicycle range, child seats, strollers, carriers, cargo bikes. It fits a brand with its own distribution, or a founder with a route to market and a launch date. And it fits the categories we know — bicycles, family mobility and child transport — where we can judge the architecture, the cost and the volume before either side commits.

  It does not fit low volumes. A school-run bike for eight children that we developed on royalty terms in 2010 sold for over a decade, but in small numbers; the model only pays for both sides when a product ships in numbers. For those projects we work on a project fee, or start with an Architecture Sprint.

Strategy, design, engineering and CMF work under one roof in Geldermalsen. We start with the architecture: the load paths, joints and interfaces that decide what a product costs, what it weighs and how many sizes and brands one core can carry. We agree it with you before design begins, then design and engineer inside it, build prototypes in our own workshop and hand over data a factory can build from.

On the royalty route the product is yours. On the licence route the architecture stays ours and you hold the licence. Fees, terms and royalty rates are agreed per product and stay between us.

A new child bike seat in EVA, developed with GMG’s founder in under a year and launched at Fietsvak in 2009. GMG ran a six-person sales and marketing company; product development came from the studio. By 2016 GMG was selling more than 250,000 seats a year, and in July 2016 Thule Group bought the company. The Yepp name continues at Thule today.

In 2002 Dorel asked the studio, then Van der Veer Designers, for two new strollers and a new face for Quinny: a buggy that folded smaller than any on the market, a stroller that unfolded by itself, and the logo, packaging and brochures to go with them. Developed with Dorel’s product team, the Zapp launched in 2004 with a curved frame and a three-dimensional fold. By 2014 more than one million had been sold. MODYN later reworked the line as the Zapp Xpress and Zapp Flex.

One lever, no tools. The Switch turns handlebar and stem together, so grips and brake levers move as one and the riding position changes in seconds. Designed at Van der Veer Designers in 1994 and fitted on Gazelle bikes since 1996.

A rear bike seat for dogs, shaped with dog behaviourists through rounds of prototypes. MODYN covered strategy, design and development support and introduced the manufacturer; the founder took it to Kickstarter in 2023, where 1,112 backers pledged €167,790 in thirty days. The seat is in production and on sale