Lee's Summary
Packaging can quickly take over valuable warehouse space as your business grows. Reviewing how much you buy, what you actually use and where stock is held can free up space without leaving you short of the packaging you need.
When we visit a customer for the first time, we’re often there to talk about a particular packaging problem. But as we’re walking around the warehouse, something else can become obvious – there’s packaging everywhere.
Boxes stacked on pallets. Rolls of bubble wrap squeezed into whatever space is available. Half-used bundles of packaging that nobody is quite sure about. Several different sizes of the same thing, some of which haven’t been touched for months.
Packaging takes up space. There’s no getting around that, but sometimes it ends up taking up far more than it needs to. And when warehouse space is already at a premium, it’s worth asking whether all that packaging really needs to be there.
You might be buying more than you actually need.
Buying in larger quantities can make good financial sense: the unit price comes down, you have plenty of stock available, and you’re less likely to run out. The problem is that all of that packaging has to go somewhere.
We’ve seen businesses order several months’ worth of boxes to get a better price, only to find themselves working around pallets of them for the next six months. At that point, the saving on the box itself needs to be considered alongside the space it’s taking up.
That doesn’t mean buying little and often is always the better answer. Smaller orders can mean higher cost and more frequent deliveries, which is more work for your team. It’s about finding the right balance between how much you buy and how much you actually need to keep on site, and sometimes, there’s another option altogether.
Your supplier could hold stock for you.
This is something many businesses don’t realise is possible until we start talking about it. For a number of our customers, we hold agreed-upon packaging stock in our own warehouse and deliver it as needed. It means they can still order in quantities that make commercial sense without having to find room for everything themselves. This can be particularly useful for bespoke packaging. Having packaging manufactured in very small batches isn’t always cost-effective, but ordering a larger production run can leave you with a lot of stock to store. If we hold that stock for you, you can call it off in smaller quantities as needed. We do this with long-standing customers where their packaging is an important part of keeping the operation moving.
We get to know what they use, how quickly they use it and when their busier periods are likely to be. The result is simple: the packaging is there when they need it, but it doesn’t all need to be in their warehouse.
You may have collected more packaging products than you realise.
Packaging ranges tend to grow gradually: a new product needs a slightly different box, then someone orders another size for a one-off project, and a different department starts buying its own packaging. Nothing gets removed, and new products keep getting added.
Fast-forward a few years, and you can end up with a surprising number of packaging products taking up space. We’ve seen businesses using several boxes with only small differences between them. In some cases, one or two carefully chosen sizes could potentially replace several existing ones. The same applies to other packaging materials.
Reviewing what you actually use can uncover products that are duplicated, rarely used, or no longer needed. It doesn’t necessarily mean stripping everything back to one box and making it work for every product. That can create a whole new set of problems, but there’s usually a sensible middle ground.
Boxes aren’t always the biggest culprit.
Boxes get a lot of the blame because they’re easy to see, but protective packaging can be just as demanding when it comes to space. Bubble wrap is a good example. You’re essentially storing large rolls of material that are mostly air. If you use several different bubble sizes, you need somewhere to keep them all. For the right operation, an on-demand protective packaging system can make much more sense. Instead of buying and storing large quantities of ready-made material, you produce what you need at the packing station when you need it.
Paper-based systems can create void fill or cushioning on demand, while air-based systems can produce different protective formats from compact rolls of film. Suddenly, the space that was filled with bulky protective packaging can be used for something else. Of course, a machine needs to make sense for the volumes you’re using. We wouldn’t recommend putting one in to save a corner of the warehouse. But when you’re getting through significant quantities of protective packaging, it’s worth looking at the numbers.
Better packaging can sometimes take up less space.
Sometimes the problem isn’t how much packaging you’re ordering but the packaging itself. A large box needs more room to store than a smaller one, and it can also require more void fill and take up more space during transport. If you’re using an oversized box for a high-volume product, changing the size could have an impact well beyond the packing bench.
We’ve seen this when working with growing businesses that started with readily available, off-the-shelf boxes. They were exactly what the business needed at the time. As volumes increased, though, it started making more sense to develop packaging specifically around the product.
A better-sized box can reduce the amount of material used inside it, take up less storage space and potentially make better use of the space available when products are shipped. Bespoke doesn’t always mean bigger or more complicated. Sometimes it simply means making something fit properly.
What else could you be doing with that space?
Warehouse space costs money, and more importantly, there’s usually something more useful you could be doing with it than storing six months’ worth of empty boxes.
You might need the space for finished products, additional manufacturing capacity, new equipment, or simply to make the warehouse easier for your team to work in.
So if packaging seems to be creeping into every available corner, it’s worth taking a proper look at why.
When we carry out a Packaging Audit, storage is one of the areas we’ll look at as part of the wider operation. Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you don’t have enough space, it’s that too much of it is being used to store packaging that doesn’t need to be there.
We get to know you.
We know what you buy, how you work and what’s important to your operation. So when something changes, you have someone you can call who already understands the background. And when it comes to packaging, sometimes having one person to call is worth quite a lot.