Packaging and warehouse stuff
March 24th, 2008 by Leslie
I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter. This year was so much fun. The girls are now 3 and 5 and REALLY got into finding eggs. Their little faces just lit up whenever they saw an egg in the bushes. We all had so much fun despite the pollen. My allergy medicine was working overtime yesterday, that’s for sure!
Now that I have a moment, I’ll get into that UPC story I glossed over the other day. Since I’m trying to run with the big dogs, it has come to my attention (thank you Janene at Trending Solutions my wonderful warehouse and distribution center) since quantities for single POs are probably going to be going up, I need to streamline and consolidate my tertiary or secondary packaging. You see, whenever a warehouse or fulfillment company touches a “piece” there is a charge. As it stands now, my cases hold 12 sets of Grill Charms. So let’s say a company wants 1440 units, that’s 120 cases. Each case would have to be handled and labeled etc… That could seriously eat up a lot of the profit. What’s the solution? Master cartons! So I put an email into my handy-dandy factory and told them I needed my cases to be cased so to speak. So now when someone puts in an order for 1440, that’s only 10 master cartons. That’s all fine and good and done but then you have to realize… each quantity of box has to have its own UPC. Now a year ago, that thought would TEERRIFY me, but now, it’s just a matter of plugging in some dimensions and voila! Out spits your new UPC. The program even asks you if your new unit is comprised of already UPC’d units and it keeps track off all that. So each of my collections of individual boxes of Grill Charms have UPCs (that’s 3 so far), then my cases of 12 for each collection have UPCs (that’s 3 more), then my master carton of cases for each collection have UPCs, for a total of 9 different UPCs. I did all that today, so I’m feeling pretty proud of myself right about now.
Leslie Haywood, Founder and President of Charmed Life Products, Inventor of Grill Charms™ www.grillcharms.com
