Custom project  / Fleet management
Two cards per vehicle, and nowhere to keep them
Every Zipcar vehicle carries an access card and a fuel card. Neither had a home, so both went missing. We built the holder that gave them one.
- Customer
- Zipcar
- Sector
- Fleet management
- What we built
- Branded two-card visor holder
- Enquiry to delivery
- 6 months
Why nothing off the shelf worked
Zipcar requires two cards in every vehicle: one for access, one for fuel. With nothing holding them, drivers left them wherever was convenient — which was rarely the car. Cards went missing constantly, and each one meant deactivating the old card and issuing a new one. The admin never stopped.
Two-card visor holders exist. Zipcar had looked at what was available online and none of it was right for how their fleet actually works. They reached out through our enterprise page having never bought from us before, said they had a very specific problem and couldn't find the product anywhere, and asked whether we would adapt something or engineer one from scratch.
What it had to do
- Hold
- Two cards — vehicle access and fuel
- Stay put
- On the visor, with the vehicle, between drivers
- Branding
- Zipcar livery on every unit
- Volume
- 2,000 to 6,000 a year
- Production
- 90 days
What we made
A two-pocket visor holder carrying their logo. They approved the first version off renderings alone and went straight to production, which is rare — most customers want something in their hands first. What followed was more interesting: they treated it as a product to improve rather than a box to tick, and came back after a year in the field with changes.
- Version one approved from renderings and put into production.
- After a year of real use, the canvas pocket was replaced with plastic.
- The pockets turned out to be too deep for quick retrieval, so the depth came down.
Where it stands
Both cards now live in the vehicle they belong to, and the deactivate-reissue cycle that came with losing them has largely gone. Zipcar doesn't share its internal numbers with us, which is fair enough for a product at this end of the fleet. The reorders say what the numbers would.
One thing did go wrong. A shipment went to an office they had moved out of, and it looked to them like we had short-shipped. Since then everything lands at our warehouse first and we distribute to each location ourselves.