Protecting products when they are shipped is essential to any manufacturer’s success.
But using wood, metal and other heavy, bulky shipping materials adds to the product’s weight, takes longer to prepare, and can sometimes lead to more goods damaged during shipment.
That’s the lesson learned by Tuscan Iron Entries, a Tennessee manufacturer of high-quality iron doors for luxury homes.
You might think that shipping iron doors would be a no-brainer: After all, the products themselves are made of durable iron. But when the company used shipping frames made out of a combination of wood and metal, products were frequently returned damaged during shipment, according to Aneel Siddiqui, who owns the company with his brother.
“With all that weight, the shippers would often drag the crates with a forklift,” Saddiqui said. “They would wrap chains around the door frames that were partially exposed in the crate. They’d pull the whole crate by the door frames and in the process bend the frame.”
And at a cost of thousands of dollars per unit shipped, that many returns costs can add up quickly.
Enter Paperboard
Saddiqui said the company tried using foam blocks and bubble wrap but found that it didn’t provide enough protection for the doors, which could weigh more than 1,000 lbs without any packaging.
That’s when they turned to laminated paperboard made from recycled materials.
Laminations, a division of Great Northern Corporation, met with Tuscan Iron Entries and developed a solution that was cheaper, lighter, and more durable than building wood frames for every set of doors that was shipped from the business’s Collierville, Tennessee, facility.
Wood Problems
Wood is still widely used as a packing material for heavier, hard-to-box products like machinery, vehicles, and metal doors. But many manufacturers are finding that there are problems associated with using wood crates.
For example, there can be long lead times for ordering the large quantities of wood to build shipping crates, so ordering just the right amount to match production can be tricky. Plus, all that wood has to be stored somewhere until it’s ready to be used to build shipping crates.
Then there are legal issues: International regulations require that any wood-crated products shipped overseas show certification that they are made of heat-treated or fumigated wood.
Plus, working with wood can be time-consuming. Workers often need to sort through wood pieces to eliminate those with warping, cracks or knotholes. For Tuscan Iron Entries, it took workers about 16 hours to prepare a single set of doors for shipment using traditional wood and metal shipping material — a cost that ultimately is passed on to the consumer.
Faster, Lighter, Cheaper
Switching to paperboard eliminated all those problems instantly, according to Saddiqui.
“With our previous packaging process, for every 10 to 12 doors we’d ship, we’d get one or two calls with a problem,” he said on Lamination’s official blog. “So far with Laminations, we’ve not had any calls about damage and no claims.”
The solution worked so well that the metal door company is now expanding its distribution range. Formerly, it could only ship to distributors that were close by its manufacturing facility. But now the company is considering shipping doors directly to customers all over the US.