Alan Albert’s creation might just work really well. This 43-year-old Montpellier resident has given a new lease of life to the shopping bag on wheels. His invention, the Chilibili, is more practical than the carts that our grandmothers dragged while shopping.
“The idea came to me a few years ago, while shopping with an old wheeled shopping bag, to make purées and compotes for my children”, confides Alan Albert, who created the company Silibiz to launch its shopping bags 2.0. “I quickly realized that it was not practical at all. Everything is crushed inside, you have to constantly remove products to put others in… And to empty it, at home, you have to plunge your arm to the very bottom…” Not easy, too, to install them in a car or on a bicycle. In short, shopping with these ancestral carts was quite an adventure.
“People find it pretty, ingenious”
Since 2007, this former physical trainer in high-level sport has been tinkering, trying to develop a more practical bag, and more in tune with the times. It was in 2020 that he made his first “more professional” prototype. And now his Chilibili is about to hit the market. The first will be sold during a crowdfunding campaign, on the Ulule platform, on October 5, for around 200 euros. “When I walk with it to the market, people find it pretty, ingenious,” smiles Alan Albert. But this campaign, “it will be my first crash test”.
The big advantage of this new generation bag is that it is practical. It is foldable, easily transportable, and can accommodate one, two or three independent compartments. No more tomatoes crashing into the bottom of the cart. “This separates heavy foods from light foods,” explains Alan Albert. The advantage, too, is that the compartments can be detached, and hang on the luggage rack of a bicycle. As for the wooden frame, you can fold it, and carry it on your back, thanks to straps.
Alan Albert’s shopping bag is also eco-friendly. To make the compartments, this inventor uses “reused materials”. “Unlike recycled materials, we keep the material as it is, explains the Montpellier resident. I use PVC tarpaulins, especially advertising tarpaulins. I cut them out, I clean them, and I send them for manufacturing to a professional integration workshop, near Toulon. And what’s particularly neat is that with these tarps recovered here and there and reused without alteration, none of the wheeled shopping bags sold by Alan Albert will be the same.