Today’s announcement of a new tagline from Dahon—“Freedom Unfolds”—contains ads for the Dahon Curve D3—“folds impressively small, yet provides the stable ride and comfort of a much larger bike”—and the Dahon los S9—a disc-brake equipped machine featuring “large-wheel feel with the stiffness and speed of a small-wheel folded package.”
The ads, part of a global advertising campaign using newspapers, lifestyle and leisure magazines, will debut August 31 at Eurobike 2011, part of “an initiative to reach an audience outside the traditional cycling market.”
Eddie Eccleston, Dahon’s global sales and marketing director, says the new messaging is intended to connect with customers “on a more emotional level, where Dahon’s previous messaging revolved more around the functionality of the product.”
Dahon’s new official website, dahonbikes.com, is under construction.
Update: Website expected to go live before Monday, August 22. Update 2: Still in static mode as of August 29. Be sure to type “www” before dahonbikes.com. Otherwise, you get a page in Chinese. Update 3: August 31. First day of Eurobike. Still no new web content. Update 4: Sept. 1. German court says no Dahon bicycles based on los or Vector patents can be sold in that country.
Final update 5: Sept. 12. Nothing new to report. Dahon’s new website, dahonbikes.com, still displays a static page. No apparent new social media presence to replace old Facebook and Twitter presences and old website, dahon.com, all of which are controlled by the folks who started up Tern.
Final, final update 6: September 16: The folks from the Nashville (Tennessee) Bicycle Lounge strolled over to the Dahon booth at the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas and asked when dahonbikes.com would go live. The answer? Two weeks. I’ve got September 30th circled. I’m eager to learn more about the lightweight JiFo 16.
