Ashley Trull was making a routine delivery for UPS in a residential neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, when a homeowner ran out the door and into the snow in his slippers, demanding to know who she was.

That’s a question that 26-year-old Trull has been getting accustomed to over the last few weeks. Sure, she’s wearing the classic brown jacket of a UPS delivery person; she’s clutching the “board”, the device that UPS uses to capture your signature and scan package bar codes.

But instead of hopping out of one of UPS’s familiar brown trucks, Trull is riding a bicycle through the streets of Providence, with packages loaded on a wheeled buggy that she tows behind her. She isn't followed by reindeer, and Trull, a millennial entrepreneur who co-founded her pedicab-fueled Sol Chariots as a tourism company, is no dead ringer for a zaftig, bearded St Nick. That hasn't stopped one 9-year-old Providence resident from dubbing her service "the Santa bike".

Of the 132m packages UPS delivered this week alone – the peak of the holiday season – perhaps only a thousand passed through the hands of Trull and her twin sister Ally as they cycled through the streets of Providence’s West End/Armory neighborhood on behalf of their 14-month-old "Baby Brown" service. Yet, their retro delivery system – dreamed up after a successful summer ferrying tourists in pedicabs in nearby Newport – may be as much of the future as it is of the past.

Low-tech isn't anathema to the delivery business. It's been 106 years since two teenage entrepreneurs set out to build a home delivery and errand-running business with the help of a $100 business loan. That company became today’s UPS: a behemoth with 400,000 employees worldwide, $54bn in annual revenues and a market capitalization of $95.7bn.

So it's not surprising that the Trulls, and other entrepreneurs like them, have provided a low-tech solution in Providence to some of the largest problems facing national delivery services like UPS and FedEx. Old-fashioned pedal power – and not the Amazonian octocopter – is UPS’s weapon of choice for the holiday rush as the delivery company tries to come up with innovative tactics to get the barrage of Christmas gifts flying through the country to their destinations. (Golf carts have become a favorite in places like Arizona.)

Retailers and shipping companies have faced two major challenges in recent years. The first is to find ways to deliver products (and instant gratification) within hours, not days. The other is to compete with the US Postal Service, which is better than any other service at completing deliveries in "the last mile" – between shipping centers and doorsteps.

Simply hiring extra trucks doesn’t address the problem of the Christmas rush, says Tom McGovern, package operations manager at the UPS facility in Warwick, Rhode Island. “We dispatch 300 vehicles a day from here, and just don’t have the ability to double that in peak delivery times like this.”

The low-tech system – popular in these days of artisanal everything and environmentally sustainable businesses – satisfies consumers who don't want to see a sci-fi movie coming at their mailboxes. “Drones are pretty freaky,” says Ally Trull. “But while our bikes pulling trailers full of boxes may seem old-school, wow, they’re getting a lot of attention for being eco-friendly as well as being just fun to see on the streets.”

Back in October, a UPS worker spotted Ashley Trull aboard one of Sol Chariots’ usual bright yellow pedicabs, with bundles of copies of Edible Rhodymagazine heaped up in the back, ready for delivery. The UPS folks pulled over to get her contact details, and within a month, the Trull twins and one of their co-workers were being trained on how to operate the scanner, where to leave packages and how to fend off angry dogs. (The trick, says Ally Trull, is to back away slowly, keeping the scanning device between you and the dog – although she adds that so far, her only wildlife encounter has been a pet rat.)

For the Trulls, the UPS contract – which runs out after the holiday season – is a boon to their profits from tourism and bakery deliveries and demonstrates how big businesses and small businesses can work together.

Sol Chariots is a co-operative with five workers, three of whom are still working toward acquiring an ownership interest. Normally, deliveries account for 10% to 20% of revenues at “Baby Brown”. The Sol Chariots cyclists deliver produce for a local food co-op, Fertile Underground, and will be making Christmas Eve deliveries of pies and muffins for two Providence bakeries, Humble Pie and Blue Bicycle Bakery (“two-wheeled cookie delivery makes a great gift!”).

“We’d like to get deliveries up to about a third of our revenue,” Ally Trull says, although the sisters expect that pedicab taxis and tours will remain the single largest source of business.

Their workdays look nothing like the usual UPS schedule. Every morning since Thanksgiving, the Trull sisters and their colleague have pulled the UPS-provided bikes and trailers out of a neighborhood lockup and cycled off to a UPS-leased U-Haul van parked on Parade Street.

There, they load up the trailers and set off on their routes. The neighborhood is largely flat, for which Ally Trull is thankful. “When we start out, the carts can be pretty full, and some packages are heavy,” she says. “I’ve delivered everything – including a 30-pound kitchen sink!”

Working with UPS has been educational. At Sol Chariots – a co-op – all workers have a voice in the decision making. At UPS, “we have a list of tasks, and our supervisor tells us when to show up and what we have to do – we’re definitely not part of the decision process,” says Ashley.

Nor, the sisters note, are they earning very much: hired as temporary workers, their pay for cycling around the neighborhood and towing hundreds of pounds of packages behind them is the same hourly sum that UPS pays the assistants who ride on the trucks beside the usual salaried drivers, and simply hops off to deliver the package. “Next year, we may want to find a way to become an official sub-contractor,” Ashley adds.

When the holiday season ends, so will Sol Chariots’ new gig as Santa’s helpers. However, Ally Trull says that the five-week experience has made the team rethink a host of business opportunities.

“It has showed me that we’re able to move a lot of packages in a short time frame, and opened my eyes to what is possible with bike delivery,” she says. “It’s added to our legitimacy – hey, it looks good on our resume to say we’ve delivered for UPS – and it’s great for the credibility of bike-powered transportation and delivery.”