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Barring doors from damage

Lighter, well-engineered shipper packaging can prove more protective and less costly for heavyweight items.

Each door is wrapped securely in laminated paperboard and then surrounded by a protective “rib-cage” frame.
Each door is wrapped securely in laminated paperboard and then surrounded by a protective “rib-cage” frame.

Tuscan Iron Entries, Collierville, TN, is a manufacturer of custom-made ornamental iron doors—some of which can weigh in excess of 1,000 pounds. The sheer weight of the doors can pose a shipping problem. But, more unexpectedly, these sturdy doors, even though packed expensively and labor-intensively in wood crates with metal racks and foam and bubble packaging protectors, occasionally arrived damaged.

Tuscan co-owner Aneel Siddiqui notes, “We were using the shipper packaging that seemed most durable, but the doors sometimes still were arriving at their destination in less than perfect condition. Because the doors are so heavy, we thought the packaging had to be substantial and heavy, too. But with all that weight, shippers often would drag the crates with a forklift, wrapping chains around the doorframes that were partially exposed in the crates. In the process, some doorframes got bent. In essence, the weight of the shipper packaging was contributing to the problem.”

Aneel’s brother and co-owner of Tuscan Iron Entries, Imran Siddiqui, adds, “The wood crates and the metal racks were very expensive. Plus, it would take two workers a full day to pack a door for shipment. That’s 16 man-hours just to get a door out the door. It was ridiculous.”

These shipping issues were compromising Tuscan’s long-term growth plans. Currently, Tuscan only ships its doors to distributors within close proximity to its manufacturing facility in Collierville, TN, a suburb of Memphis. But the company envisions selling and shipping doors to customers across the U.S. That means using common carriers and exposing the packs to frequent cross docking, making the doors more vulnerable to damage through the wood/metal shipper pack barriers.

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