How would you like to box up some savings on your boxes?
Packaging can be a simple way to reduce material and shipping costs in your operation. Size, weight, and material figure into your shipping, warehousing, and fulfillment costs. Here are some tips to aid your bottom line.
–> Right-size your packaging:
Using a box that’s too large means your product will either rattle around inside it, with the possibility of damage, or cost you more in void fill or padding. UPS and FedEx use dimensional pricing—calculating shipping cost based on either weight or volume, whichever is higher. Extra dimensions mean extra dollars and cents.
Sometimes tiny changes can result in big savings. One company changed the length of its frozen pizza boxes by 1/16th of an inch and its height by 3/8th of an inch. Consumers didn’t notice such a small change, but it allowed the company to put more boxes of pizzas into a case and ship more product per pallet. The change ultimately resulted in a cost savings of over $500,000 per year.
Ikea saved $1.4 million annually just by redesigning the packaging on one sofa. And how about Dell, which redesigned packaging for multiple products in 2017? The rightsized packaging for a single laptop saved over 49,000 pounds in packaging and enabled Dell to fit 13% more laptops per pallet during shipping. Their combined reduction effects saved them over $13 million per year.
–> Reduce your package lineup:
Will your products fit in two or three-sized boxes instead of 20? If so, you can reduce your material cost and save storage space in your warehouse.
–> Reevaluate your packaging material:
Are you shipping your product in a box when a poly or paper mailer would do the job just as well, with less dim weight, saving you on shipping?
–> Reduce the number of inserts:
Is something going inside your packages that doesn’t need to? Sonos used to include a long legal booklet as an insert in every speaker package. Then they digitized the file and sent it to all customers by email instead. This reduction in inserts helped them reduce package sizes and weight, saving them over $680,000 per year.
Your operation may be smaller than Ikea, Dell and other companies mentioned here, but there may be potential cost savings in your packaging design just waiting to be discovered. We’re ready to help you find them.