How to Ship Furniture Without It Being Destroyed

How to ship your furniture products without them arriving destroyed.

Tough and painful lessons I learned shipping furniture nation wide.

Shipping furniture nationwide with LTL freight companies nearly bankrupted my business.

My brand Texas Custom Kennels builds and ships dog kennel furniture nationwide.

We’d build a beautiful piece of furniture, mount it to a pallet, pad it with foam, and carriers like Unishippers, Saia, and Old Dominion would deliver it completely destroyed.

As an added bonus they would often say that my item was over-weight and double my quoted price.

My “fully-insured” claims would get denied, and it got so bad that I was getting close to legal action with one company (Unishippers, they suck and yes I’m naming names) that said I still owed them $4000 in delivery charges when they destroyed over $4,000 worth of my work.

Nicely crated up and ready to go to its new home

Completely ruined. This was part of a custom furniture suite. Every piece was damaged in some way.

It. Was. Horrible.

Discovering Independent Carriers

I finally discovered the world of independent hot shot delivery drivers. This was night and day better. I use a company called Uship.com (I’m not sponsored or affiliated with them in anyway, but I’m happy to name names.)

Wow, what a difference!

The driver’s are all independent business owners and Uship.com acts as a middle-man (I don’t know why “middle-men” get a bad rap they are very useful) between you as a shipper and the drivers. I finally found small business owners who cared about getting my items from point A to B safely, instead of being told “I’m just doing my job” by drivers, customer service reps, dock managers.

Seriously, I may “accidentally” punch the next person that says “I’m just doing my job” in the face. You know who else was “just doing their job?” All the low level German solders who rounded up millions of innocent people!

Sorry….Sorry. I’m getting worked up, but seriously, Unishippers.com sucks don’t ever waste $20,000 with them…Yeah.

Now shipping is (or was pre-Covid…sigh) pretty easy and straight forward. And surprisingly cheaper, or at least without surprise charges.

Plus now I get messages like this

I did not receive messages like this when using LTL Freight. In fact, even when things, miraculously, arrived undamaged I’d receive calls about how rude the drivers were and frustrating the experience was.

How to Ship Your Furniture

The first thing you need to do is prepare your furniture for shipping. While independent drivers don’t attack your hard work with a forklift, you still want to protect it for getting bumped around.

**The nice text above was about this kennel**

I always build a skid or a pallet to mount my furniture too. It only adds about 20-30lbs. This also adds material beyond the edges of the piece that acts as a buffer when sliding it around.

Plus, I have a pallet jack that I use to move things around easily.

Three layers of protection.

Plastic Wrap - I wrap the kennel or furniture in plastic. Believe it or not the quality of this varies drastically. Here’s a link to the good stuff, it’s about the same price as the cheap stuff. Plastic Stretch Wrap
Carpet Padding - Why didn’t I think of this a few thousand dollars ago!? Plus, you can use it for MOVING, or lots of things. I buy the big rolls from home depot and I can normally pack 2-3 kennels really well. Thank you Bob! (Keep reading to learn more about this awesome human)
More Plastic Wrap - to hold the carpet padding on.

Story time - before, back when I was trying to keep freight companies from destroying my products. I would:

build a pallet
Mount it to the pallet
Wrap it in Plastic
Wrap it in 1” thick foam insulation
Build an OSB Box around it
Pray that it arrive in at least repairable condition

Thank you Bob!

Then Bob came one day to pick up his Kennel from my shop. As I was helping him load it up he pulled out carpet padding to cushion his tie-downs.

“That’s a good idea” I said. Bob replied “I manage a flooring store and we always have extra carpet padding laying around, plus its super cheap.”

Thanks to Bob and Uship my furniture now gets there damage free.

Or at least it did before Covid decimated millions of small business owners

Before I discovered carpet padding I was spending an average of $153.59 in JUST MATERIALS to package my dog kennels.

Now I spend $67.26 and it takes about 1/2 the packaging time.

Here’s the video

I know, I could have led with this. But then you would have heard about Bob, or Uship, or seen some great Parks and Rec Gifs.

Thanks for reading. Be sure to connect with me and other woodworkers on our Facebook Group