Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

In response to yesterday’s post, I received this lengthy message from Chris, a supply chain manager. Herein lies everything you ever wanted to know about the physical realities of one-click shopping. All this said, couldn’t Apple just ship its adapters and other miscellaneous items in iPod boxes, which are readily available and far better fitted to the items in question? Then again, those boxes are obviously a custom design, so maybe Apple’s math says that they’re only worth the money if they’re used to ship iPods. Supply chain management is hard.

I have a love/hate relationship with the topic of the sizes of cartons used to ship miscellaneous things.

I love it because the beef people have with tiny things in big boxes is legitimate and poses extremely interesting problems.  In the case of Apple, you are correct that it doesn’t make much sense that they have this issue.  I agree that they have done a superb job in engineering and designing their packaging to be functional as retail marketing, highly shippable, and capable of protecting the product within.  They seem to have their core products down, perfectly.  It seems like what tripped them up here—this is the part that drives the Hate end of the relationship—is that they have a catchall box of small size.  That box you took a photo of appears to be well thought out in that it is easily collapsible despite being sturdy, and can handle a wide variety of  what are probably the miscellaneous items that Apple sells.  This probably works for them because they don’t sell many things.  Maybe just a few hundred items.

I hate this conversation because box sizing is not some simple question. It seems simple on paper when you order one thing, that the single item should be in an appropriately sized box.  Some are, but the box they are in cannot be shipped, because it would get completely mauled during the process (shipping stuff is an ugly, ugly practice).  Box sizing is actually not the easiest thing in the world to perfect.  Unless all the items you sell are in boxes that are themselves shippable (withstand conveyors, getting bashed by other boxes, handled by numerous people, and have an exterior that will allow a shipping label to adhere to it) you will need extra boxes.  Again, Apple does this well by putting most of their items in boxes that are shippable and even UPS-able.

Picking box sizes is not the easiest task in the world, as vendors tend to carry a fairly standard collection of sizes.  When you get fairly large, and can special order custom box sizes in bulk, you can start to take advantage of peculiarities of your inventory.  Note that Amazon boxes tend to come roughly book-sized, with creases that allow them to change the box depth.  This allows them to carry fewer types of boxes, which is extremely important since boxes take up a good deal of space both in racked storage where they sit waiting to be used, and in a production readiness stage (a normal looking box, waiting to be filled, in a stack of 100 other boxes).  However, there is only so much slimming down of your box variety you can actually accomplish, before you end up shipping multiple, half-filled boxes and are back to the same problem.  Companies end up making decisions on which box sizes work the best on a macro level.

As an example of Macro box usage, the company I work for shipped over 500,000 cartons yesterday, purely consumer supplies.  Some of those were bulk cartons and came in boxes that were ready to ship, but a sizable portion were filled with at least 1 loose item, and some dunnage (paper/plastic/foam peanuts used to keep things from moving during shipment).  Probably close to two thirds of our cartons shipped are ones we packed ourselves.  That’s 300,000 loose cartons across thirty Distribution Centers nationwide that were flat packed cardboard yesterday night.  Those cartons either went to UPS, a regional courier, or one of our many delivery locations for final delivery to a customer.  I mention all of this to give a good idea about the scope in which a box will be used, and how far it might travel (anywhere from 10 to 2,000 miles, individually).  Any packing method we choose needs to sustain all of those conditions, because it honestly costs a lot of money to store all of this stuff.  If 100 flat boxes fit on a pallet stacked four feet high (safe shipping height), then we used up 3,000 pallets worth of boxes yesterday.  A pallet position is 48″x40″x52″ (4″ pallet, 48″ products), which means we used up 173,301 cubic feet of space housing empty boxes for yesterday, when they were flat packed.  Mind you, warehouse space is portioned out mostly in square footage, so the total space used to store these boxes are even higher, since we store them by type, not all mashed together.  (Typically we will run three pallets high in a stack for safety, meaning yesterday’s boxes used 1,000 square feet)  The more types of boxes you carry, the more floor space you use up, which needs to be heated and lit, and cannot be used to house products that customers want to buy.  The more complex your box assortment, the more complex the costs are associated with everything you do.  The costs of order fulfillment actually do translate into customers choosing one company over another.  I cannot speak to how much of a given person’s buying decision is made up on costs, but I’d be willing to bet with office supplies, people care about cost more than other things they buy, due to the fact that consumer supplies can be considered a commodity.

All that being said, choosing the right assortment of boxes to use (the right number of box types, the right size per type, the right cardboard to protect against shipping damage, the right costs) is a science.  There is a lot of time and energy that goes into it.  I have a love/hate relationship with this topic because I love all of the math, logic, engineering, and planning that goes into box optimization; I hate getting an angry email because a person who got their product we sourced next day, either via our own stock or a wholesaler, received it in a box they deemed inappropriately sized.  An extra $2-10 would probably get you any sized box you want, but you wouldn’t want to pay it.