At Racer Boxes, we know that how you present and package your goods is an important part of what makes your brand. As a wholesale box manufacturer, we create boxes right here in Vancouver. However, while we love all things related to packaging and cardboard, we’re also outside-the-box thinkers. We pay special attention to brand packaging, which is why we provide custom box printing to enhance the beauty of your products and brand.
While we believe that custom-printed boxes are the way to go for ultra-professionalism and flare, we understand that start-ups have to be budget conscious. For clients who need to pretty up their packages without breaking the bank, we recommend incorporating some customized stickers.
In packaging, stickers are most commonly found inside boxes—such as a seal on tissue paper. However, there’s no reason why you can’t use a customized sticker to enhance the beauty of your package on the outside, too.
The trick is to consider the design. Simply chucking a bunch of stickers on a box can look unprofessional. Instead, why not go for a label-like look that doubles as the sealing tape on your mailer box? Conversely, if a more traditional look is the objective, a metallic seal with a little embossing can be an inexpensive ticket to a classy look. For a more home-grown, grassroots kind of vibe, a label that incorporates space for a short handwritten message is sure to appeal to earthy lovers of kombucha and avocado toast.
There are many creative ideas out there. Try working with a designer to come up with a solution that’s both professional and affordable.
Then, when you’re ready to take your business to the next level (or when sticking 500 stickers to boxes every day is no longer a viable option), ask us how custom box printing and custom packaging can lend greater cohesion and polish to your brand. Don’t forget, we buy in tremendous volume at Racer Boxes, and pass our purchasing power onto you. That means bigger savings for small, medium, and large businesses.
Earth Day wasn’t that long ago. As a box manufacturer, we have to consider the impact we have on the environment. Many people love to hate packaging, but good packaging is actually is one of the most underrated tools for reducing waste. It makes sense when you think about it. If your packaging is snug, it means less material and less waste, which also translates into less cost—win-win!
Sometimes creating the right boxes for your goods is a customized job, but certainly one worth considering if it means eliminating extra bulk and weight, which can shave off expensive shipping costs. At Racer Boxes, we’ve created a range of standardized box sizes that fit a variety of applications. However, we’re always ready to help with a custom job. After all, providing the highest quality, the best service, and the most affordable pricing is how we’ve built our reputation.
While opting for the correct box sizes is an environmentally savvy choice, there are other factors to consider as well. Take the food industry, for example. An enormous amount of energy goes into producing, storing, and preparing to transport fruits and vegetables. When food is damaged during transportation, it means all of the water, land use, energy and financial resources that went into producing it are also squandered.
When it comes to protecting and transporting food, the right packaging makes all the difference. The produce boxes at Racer Boxes are specially designed for shipping fruits and vegetables. These boxes are durable with die-cut holes that allow your produce to breathe, ensuring it stays fresh while keeping it protected. In addition, our stackable (space-saving) fruit trays are the perfect fit for fresh strawberries, mushrooms, tomatoes, apples, peaches, and more!
Custom printing is available for all our products, and we are pleased to offer prices on complete skids. Being based in Richmond, we are in a position to deliver all over the Lower Mainland, and can arrange flexible shipping options for clients concerned about space and storage.
Learn more about how Racer Boxes can help you save money—and the environment. As a BC-based wholesale box manufacturer, we are pleased to work with clients in Burnaby, Langley, Surrey, Abbotsford—and beyond!
A Great Place to Buy Packing Supplies in Vancouver BC
If you are a business operating out of the Vancouver Lower Mainland and need an affordable, good quality cardboard box supplier, Racer Printing and Box Manufacturing is worth checking out. Unlike most packing supply distributors, Racer Boxes manufactures and sells their boxes directly to businesses. On top of that, Racer Boxes also sells other packing supplies wholesale, making them more of a one-stop packing supply distributor.
Packing supplies are sold in bulk by the case, such as cases of pallet wrap and cases packing tape, and includes free shipping within Metro Vancouver for orders over $500. One of the things that sets Racer Boxes apart is their custom boxes and custom box and tape printing services, as well as their exception customer service. Racer Boxes truly listens to their customers’ needs, which is actually why they continue to add new packing supply items to their list.
Things to Pick up When You Order From Racer Boxes in Richmond BC
- Hand Shrink Wrap – AEP and DC branded Pallet Shrink Wrap: order 4 per a case or by the full skid of a volume discount
- Packing Tape – BOPP packing tape and Freezer Tape (features acrylic adhesive designed to work cold temperatures). Order 36 per case or call for a volume discount
- Custom Printed Tape – custom printed packing tape, 1 – 2 colours on either clear or white based tape
- Accessories – Racer Boxes sells a bunch of other packing supplies that makes life easier in the shipping and packing department
The Place for High Quality & Affordable Shipping Supplies
Racer Boxes manufacturing facility provides among the highest quality corrugated cardboard boxes along with with high definition printing services — all available in-house. Stand out services such as box printing and custom printed tape makes Racer Boxes an excellent choice for branded packaging as well.
If you are in the greater Vancouver Area, contact Racer Printing and Boxes Manufacturing at (604) 270 – 8205 and get a quote for your wholesale packing supplies. With free delivery within Metro Vancouver for $200 orders, it’s an excellent and convenient service!
Buy Your Clothing Shipping Cardboard Boxes Locally
Racer Boxes in Vancouver BC makes and sells apparel cardboard boxes for shipping garments, hats, and clothing in Vancouver BC. This gives local Vancouver area businesses in the apparel sector a great reliable partner for their wholesale shipping boxes supply. As a cardboard box manufacturer, we make high quality boxes for apparel, including Clothing Display Trays, 2 Piece Insert Organizers, and slotted cartons.
For those in the Vancouver apparel industry, there’s no need to order your boxes and clothing packaging from far away when you can save by buying your boxes directly from a local box manufacture. There are plenty of advantages with working with Racer Boxes as your clothing box supplier, we’re local to the Vancouver area which keeps shipping costs down. We offer flexible services. And we pride ourselves on industry leading customer service. If you have questions or particular needs, we encourage you to call us without hesitation.
In terms of order sizes, we provide small, medium, and large size shipments and we offer flexibility — such as smaller, weekly shipments. That service can come in handy, for instance, rather than ordering a whole pallet of boxes at a time, you can save yourself the storage space with our regular weekly deliveries. Whatever your apparel box needs, give us a call so we can work according to your needs.
To be sure, we do not produce retail boxes, rather we only make shipping boxes for apparel. We also make and sell custom cardboard boxes according to your needs and specifications.
Your Greater Vancouver Apparel Box Manufacturer
If your business requires wholesale apparel cardboard boxes or considering unique ways of saving on your packaging overhead costs, give Racer Boxes and Printing in Vancouver BC a call. To get started, give us a call at (604) 270 – 8205.
Local Cardboard Boxes in Bulk for Wholesale Prices
Retail Price Kills Margins
When you are buying your cardboard boxes from a box store, you’re giving your margins to the distributor. While there is the convenience of buying very small qualities, you are paying full retail price. If you are selling with any volume, it’s better to buy bulk and get a wholesale price. You can easily get the same quality as any brand name store provides but at a fraction of the cost. That savings means more profit on your end.
Buy Direct from the Manufacture
A lot of the bulk cardboard suppliers are not actually manufactures of the boxes, rather they buy in bulk and markup the price. There’s far fewer manufactures that sell directly to businesses, many are not setup to provide customer service to end users like we are at Racer Boxes Printing and Manufacturing. The advantage of buying direct is savings, essentially you’re cutting out the middle men reducing your cost and effectively increasing your profit.
Buy from a Local Box Manufacturer
Some of the big cardboard box distributors may appear to have low prices per box when you’re browsing their websites, however in the end the added shipping costs often mitigate any savings. Going with a local box supplier means the shipping is local. That means less of you money goes into gas and labour and so on for the shipping company. Again, reducing your cost per box and increasing your profit.
Get Weekly Shipments
Another advantage when you’re buying from a local box manufacture like Racer Boxes is that we can provide weekly shipments of our products. Rather than buy a whole pallet of boxes at a time, you can save yourself the storage space and rely on weekly deliveries.
Whether weekly shipments will save you money depends on your situation; for example, in some cases you may not have the space and will require to buy lower volume. In other cases, the space located for storing your boxes may be put to better use than inventory. Here’s a case study where one of our customers saved by switching from buying his boxes in bulk to getting weekly shipments delivered from us.
Your Greater Vancouver Corrugated Box Manufacturer
If your business requires wholesale cardboard boxes or is looking into unique ways of saving on your packaging overhead costs, give Racer Boxes and Printing in Vancouver BC a call. To get started, give us a call at (604) 270 – 8205.
In our last post on How to Save on Buying Pallet Wrap in Bulk, we looked at reasons why every business should be using pallet wrap to save money – both in terms of less upfront costs and also in terms of the potentially devastating back-end costs.
In this post, we will review common mistakes when wrapping a pallet and how to properly secure pallets for shipment.
Improper pallet wrapping
To wrap your orders effectively to reduce shipping damage, costs, and liability, it’s important to first know what not to do. Putting the disaster scenarios from the last post aside, the more common expense is from shipping damage due to items moving or falling off the pallet during shipment.
Shipping damage often happens when loose boxes or products are not wrapped properly.
Improper wrapping can be a major concern, one of my clients who sells large heavy rolls of industrial fabric has had to reconsider his shipping partner after having many of his customers complain that their orders where arriving with rolls thrown across the trailer floor.
The issue wasn’t that the shipping partner wasn’t using pallet wrap, it was that there were not using it correctly to contain the rolls.
Here’s the most common mistakes of incorrectly pallet wrapping:
- Loosely packing a shipment. If the items are not packed tightly before shipment, you can count on them shifting during shipment. In this case, it doesn’t matter how well wrapped or how tightly stretched the pallet wrap is. If the palletized items have gaps between them, those gaps will allow items to shift inwards during shipment and this will make the pallet unstable. A related issue is incorrectly staking a load. Stacking a load takes a bit of foresight and understanding of physics. For instance, a shipment of rolls should be cross-hatched rather than stacked all in the same direction. Or a mixed shipment should have the looser heaver more stable Essentially, this creates the same dangerous situation that we find in #2.
- Not stretching the wrapping tight enough. Pallet wrap must be stretched tight as drum. If the wrap is put on loosely (read: not stretched tightly enough), the items will begin to shift outwards during shipment and create an insecure load. A pallet wrap dispenser with a tightly calibrated tensioner helps to resolve this issue, yet it’s not fool-proof as we will see in the next steps.
- Not anchoring the load to the pallet. Anchoring products to a pallet is an often-skipped step yet it can easily lead to items shifting off a palate during transport – especially due to wild forklift rides where the operator believes the pallet is more secure than it actually is. The reason why this step is skipped is because it takes a lot of conscious effort and work. You need to get down very low with the wrap dispenser to ensure the bottom corners of the pallet are wrapped and bring the wrap up to the upper corners of the stack to ensure the load is firmly secured to the pallet. This requires going around the pallet multiple times in a bottom-to-top, top-to-bottom cross-hatched pattern. It’s dizzying and takes a lot of effort.
- Inconsistent tension. If the wrap is too loose or too tight, it can compromise the containment of the load. Too tight and the wrap might rip. Too loose, specific pressure points can also lead to instability. Some shippers and warehouses don’t use wrap dispensers and this can easily lead to the film being inconsistently stretched. The benefit from having a tight tensioner set is that it helps to ensure the same amount of force is applied across the whole wrapping process. Yet a tight tensioner also means a lot of effort is required to wrap the pallet. It takes some effort to stretch the pallet wrap by hand, even with a dispenser.
- Sparse, inconsistent coverage. To apply pallet, wrap securely to contain a heavy load for long distance shipments, it’s necessary to wrap several times around the entire bundle – going over the same areas several times. A single wrap may work in principle, however it’s easy to leave weak points where the coverage is missing or where wrap could tear or stretch out over time. Having multiple layers provides redundancy and ensures full coverage to protect from punctures, rips, tear, and overall containment.
How to Properly Wrap a Pallet
- Use a pallet wrap dispenser with tensioner and calibrate the tensioner so it stretches the film firmly as the wrap is dispensed. You want the film tight and secure but not pressing the limit of tearing.
- Anchor the film first by pulling a foot or more out by hand and tying it to the pallet by hand. Then use the wrap dispenser to walk the wrap around the base of the pallet several times. The aim here is to secure the load to the pallet.
- Walk the pallet wrap dispenser around the palletized items, starting at the bottom moving slowly to the top. Be sure to overlap ea lap by about half the width of the film.
- Criss-cross the wrap from lower corners to adjacent upper corners for several laps – as shown in the diagram on the right.
- Keep overlapping to build-in redundancy and to protect against rips and tears and abrasions as well as g-forces.
Overall a general rule here is that you want to overdo it a little. The cost of overusing pallet wrap is lower than the potential cost of under using it.
Buy your Pallet Wrap Wholesale in Richmond BC
If you are looking to save on your Pallet Wrap purchases, you can buy your wrap wholesale (at 4 rolls per case) from Racer Printing and Box Manufacturing in Vancouver BC.
To place an order, call us today at (604) 270 – 8205.
Buying Hand Shrink Wrap in Bulk from Racer Boxes
While Racer Boxes is a box manufacturing and printing company, many of our customers appreciate the convenience and the added value of buying their palate wrap wholesale through us along with their order of wholesale cardboard boxes. The combination makes sense, as many of our customers that order wholesale shipping boxes also need to go through large amounts of hand shrink wrap.
One of things we always try to do is provide exceptional service and that’s why we started adding wholesale warehouse and shipping products such as bulk cases of packing tape and pallet wrap, along with pallet wrap dispensers and other products that go along naturally with our cardboard box manufacturing and sales services.
Surprisingly, not everyone in business knows the value of palate wrap, having worked in manufacturing myself for many years I’ve worked with warehousing and shipping companies that either don’t use palate wrap at all or with those that use it incorrectly to the extent of completely negating its utility.
In this post, we are going look at why every business should be using pallet wrap to secure their pallets for shipment. And we will then move onto how to use pallet wrap effectively to reduce costs and liability.
Why Every Shipper Should Buy Pallet Wrap
Wrapping pallets is a critical step in preparing a shipment of boxes or other items and securing those items to a pallet for transportation. In the most basic sense, pallet wrap is just plastic film on a roll – like kitchen wrap – but it’s a much different beast than the plastic wrap used in kitchens. It’s industrial strength, covers a larger surface area in a single pass, and engineered specifically to contain and protect shipping items.
Pallet wrapping — when done correctly with a Pallet Wrap Dispenser with built in tensioner — effectively turns a collection of pails, rolls, or stacked boxes into a single stable unit and secures all the boxes onto the pallet. Even with miss-matched sizes and shapes, pallet wrap ensures that nothing slides off the pallet and potentially damages your products, property, or any staff during the regular course of warehousing and shipping of your goods. It won’t protect your products from serious accidents, impacts, or fires, but if a forklift driver nearing the end of his shift takes a turn to quickly, it could well mean the difference between your products staying nicely packed and stacked on the pallet and having your products hurled across the warehouse — potentially impacting other property or people.
It’s like a passenger seatbelt for your products, it can prevent your cargo from turning into projectiles. In terms of liability and costs, the damage from putting it on can cost a lot less than recovering from a disaster. So, if your products are shipped on pallets or stacked on pallets and lifted around the warehouse, pallet wrap can save you a lot of headache and expense from damages resulting for moving insecure pallets.
Stay Tuned for Part Two: How to Wrap a Pallet for Shipment.
Buy your Pallet Wrap Wholesale in Richmond BC
If you are looking to save on your Pallet Wrap purchases you can buy them wholesale (at 4 rolls per case) from Racer Printing and Box Manufacturing in Vancouver BC. To place an order, call us today at (604) 270 – 8205.
Dimensions of your shipping box is an important cost consideration to evaluate when choosing to order wholesale cardboard boxes.
Ideally, you’ll want to order sizes with respect to the pricing guidelines set out by your shipping and distribution partners as typically you’ll find price brackets according to box dimensions. So if most of your products will fit in a box size that’s within a lower price tier, that’s an ideal situation. Of course you’ll need to take into consideration how well the packing, protection, and unboxing experience works for your products and brand, and we have covered this topic in a previous post if that’s your main consideration.
Sometimes however it’s not so easy to order wholesale shipping boxes because your products don’t easily fall into the specific sizing brackets of your partners and your volume isn’t enough to justify buying pallets of boxes at a time and storing all those boxes. This is where some shippers look at cutting down their boxes to size for specific products.
Why We Don’t Recommend Cutting Down Boxes
While reducing your box size manually may seem like your best solution, there are many reasons not to take this DIY approach.
- Saving you any money. When you calculate the labour cost you need to put into cutting your boxes, and the fact that you still need to have a larger box to start with, you may find the savings don’t add up.
- Depending on how many boxes you need to cut down, it may actually be more affordable to call us at Racer Boxes Manufacturing & Printing to see how we can help you get the right sized boxes from the start and save yourself the trouble of “resizing”.
- Warehousing / storage costs. Ordering different sizes doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll use more inventory space. When dealing direct with the shipping box manufacturer, as is the case with us, it may turn out that you do not need to order as many boxes as you think.
- We provide affordable solutions for businesses such as weekly and monthly shipment options that can help lower your warehousing / storage costs compared to ordering a larger shipment all at once.
- Structural integrity. Another important reason we don’t recommend reducing your own boxes is that cuts from a box reducer can introduce points of failure, lowering
Drop tester to simulate shocks to packaged product from material handling during shipment your shipping box’s crush and impact resistance.
- It’s always best to buy the right sizes of boxes for your products –no one involved is going to be happy if your boxes cave in and crush your products while in transit or at a storage facility.
- Branded experience. Cutting down a box with a reducer tool usually looks distinctly DIY. The flaps might end up being extra-long, print and logos might be misplaced or disfigured, folds and joints might show where they shouldn’t or look unnatural.
- If you’re only looking at your bottom line the look of your shipping box might seem trivial however customer retention and marketing can depend heavily on the unboxing experience – especially for ecommerce.
In the end, it’s important to weigh out all of your options when choosing which box sizes to order and whether you may need to cut down your boxes for specific shipments.
We Do Not Use Box Reducers
To be sure, at Racer Boxes, we do not reduce boxes sizes nor cut them down – this is not a service we offer nor recommend. We manufacture cardboard boxes according to strict specifications to ensure a high level of quality and structural integrity.
Related Posts
- Subscription Box Marketing: Custom Die-Cut Mailers
- Competitive Advantages in eCommerce: Custom Mailers 101
- How to Order Wholesale Custom Boxes for Amazon FBA
- Amazon Product Packaging: Custom Printed Box vs Poly Bag
Buy the Box Sizes You Need in Western Canada
We are Racer Boxes Manufacturing & Printing, located in Richmond BC (just south of Vancouver).
If you are in the Greater Vancouver Area, the Okanagan, the Pacific Northwest, or Western Canada, we recommend giving us a call at (604) 270 – 8205 to help you go over your options and decide whether ordering your shipping boxes directly from us makes sense for your business.
Reducing the Cost of Shipping Damages
Reducing the cost of shipping damage is problem for virtually all businesses. For all the hard work that goes into producing your product, it’s all for nothing if the product comes dead on arrival due to a poorly designed shipping box. Even if your products are insured or not fragile, if the box gets to the customer looking like it was kicked through the street, it will affect the first impression of your brand — a critical moment as your customer’s first material experience with your brand usually starts with your shipping box.
How to Reduce Shipping Damages
Clearly printing fragile along with key symbols and instructions is the first step to reduce shipping damages. However often times that alone is not enough. Turns out there is a sociological element to how people shipping your product treat objects according to it’s perceived contents. It makes sense in you are shipping glass, you might print “GLASS” on box. However what if you are shipping something that is clearly not glass?
The technologically advanced bicycle company Vanmoof made international news in September of this year as they were discovered employing a crafty trick to reduce shipping damages of their bikes. The solution they came up with — they printed large TVs on the shipping boxes.
Jason Gay of The Wall Street Journal was the first to catch and report on this smart little trick via Twitter.
Just like that, Shipping Damage to our Bikes Dropped by 70–80%
Bex Rad, VanMoof’s creative director said in a post on Medium that “Your covetable products, your frictionless website, your killer brand — they all count for nothing when your delivery partner drops the ball.”
By changing the shipper’s perception of the product from transporting bikes to flatscreen televisions, VanMoof created a direct reduction in shipping damages: “shipping damage to our bikes dropped by 70-80 percent” said Rad.
Strategic Printing or Deception?
This is certainly a matter of strategy that walks a fine line. It comes down to a little utilitarian calculus: which is better, (a) deceiving your shippers and possibly confusing your customers or (b) reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction? If e-commerce is a large part of your business, the risk of damaged goods may be enough to justify (b), VanMoof’s strategy.
VanMoof is an ecommerce based retailer with plans to sell 90% of their bikes online. So they justify the strategy as follows “anyone in the ecom world knows you’re only as good as your shipping partner. […] Yet no matter who was doing the shipping, too many of our bikes arrived looking like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester. It was getting expensive for us, and bloody annoying for our customers.”
So what it came down to in this case was strategic cardboard box printing. Do you think this strategy will this work for you? If so, let us know and we can help!
Vancouver Corrugated Box Printer
If your business is considering custom printed shipping boxes or other ways to reduce shipping damages, Racer Boxes and Printing in Vancouver BC can help. To get started, give us a call at (604) 270 – 8205.
If you’re pleased with the cardboard boxes, products, and services we have provided, please let the world know about it with a G+ review!
Please give us a 5 star rating on G+, simply click the link below and follow the prompts!
If for any reason you are unable to give us a perfect rating on G+, please let us know why! Please call us at (604) 270 – 8205 or fill out this form and let us know what’s holding you back from recommending us to others!
Racer Printing and Box Manufacturing has always prided it’s self on providing exceptional customer service, high quality boxes, and affordable prices. Your satisfaction means the world to us.
If you are new to Google reviews, it’s easier than you think! Just follow the prompts and Google will walk you through the process!
Don’t forget to share on Facebook and Twitter too! As a small family run business, your help means a great deal to us!
Thank you very much,
The Racer Boxes Team