Glass in a courier network, zero complaints all season

The client sells from their own shop and through marketplaces. They came to us before the holiday season — the point at which parcel volume multiplies month over month and the packing bench turns from a minor task into the bottleneck of the whole company.

Until then a parcel was a universal box, bubble wrap and loose fill added by eye. That worked while a few dozen parcels left every day; at several hundred it started costing both time and nerves.

Glass in a courier network goes through a dozen or so handovers and at least one sorting chute. A jar rarely breaks from a single flat drop — it breaks when it knocks against the next jar, or against the same spot on the box wall, for the whole journey.

One breakage is not the cost of one jar. It is a refund, a second shipment, customer service time and — the most expensive part — a public review left on a brand that sells on the promise of care.

• The universal box left a few centimetres of slack, so the jars worked loose along the whole route.
• Every parcel needed manual topping-up with filler — the higher the peak, the longer the queue at packing.
• Bubble wrap sat badly with a brand built on natural ingredients.
• The season was about to multiply volume, and every construction flaw multiplies with it.

We started from a measurement — of the jar, not the box. Diameter, height with the lid on and the tolerance of a glass batch gave us the cell size. From that came a 5-layer divider insert that splits the interior into compartments and stops the jars touching each other or the outer wall.

The box itself is an e-commerce construction with an automatic bottom: the packer opens it in one motion, drops the jars and bottles into their cells and locks the lid shut. Filler became unnecessary, because cushioning is now the job of the construction rather than of something poured in.

• 5-layer divider insert with cells sized to the jar and the pump bottle.
• Automatic bottom — the box sets up in one motion, with no tape underneath.
• Interior height chosen so the closed lid holds the jars down from above.
• Single-colour logo print on the lid — no varnish, no laminate, all of it recyclable.