Im still a little new to this and ive already made 7 trades but it bothers me that even when everythings packed up you can hear the beer inside swishing around. I never have fedex pick it up since i drive by the shipping place everyday. Is this something i should get use to or is there a way to somewhat sound proof the box of the swishing noise? Any and all input would be appreciated.
@mythaeus put together some good tips on packaging here I like his tip of creating a "BBQ" company and telling the folks at FedEx you're shipping BBQ sauce and marinade. I've never personally done this, but I've read that some folks add a container of tic-tacs in a package to create a distracting rattling sound. Beer and fresh breath? Seems legit to me.
Pack the bottles vertically and there will be almost no sloshing sound. EDIT: And others will surely tell you to put loose rice, macaroni, pennies, etc into your box to "cover" the sloshing noise. But I've never understood that. Not only is it annoying to open a box exploding with rice, beans, or noodles, but I would assume a FedEx/UPS employee would hear a loose rattling sound and assume something within may have been damaged or broken and open the box to inquire.
I need to figure out what to do with the 2 12 bottle and 1 6 bottle cardboard horizontal shippers I received. Every time I do a test run on them, I hear the sloshing and wonder how the heck they made it to me. I guess I'm just paranoid.
I'm not sure what you mean by "horizontal shipper", but shippers of that size should be somewhat square-ish right? Can you just put the label on the end that you want to be upright, and put lots of "this side up" notations on the four sides?
I always have a vision of the ups or fed ex guy laughing like a maniac making sure those arrows are the wrong way, maybe I'm just cynical .
I usually double-boxed, put bottles upright, used lots of bubble wrap and newspaper and styrofoam peanuts, and I couldn't hear any sloshing whatsoever. The one time I used a styro shipper, I could hear sloshing.
You must not ship 750's and 500's because man those make so much noise regardless of how you ship them. JK bottles are the worst. I also agree with you on the rice and stuff, if anything the box makes even more noise drawing more attention. I will say when I first started shipping I would put some pennies in a can and crush it in the middle so they couldn't fall out. It was silly in hindsight but I felt it was better than rice or tictacs. And I always had empty cans and pennies haha. Not everyone has access to 20,000 t shirts like you do man lol. But I couldn't hear squat in that last box haha.
I have shipped close to 100 boxes and never done anything to mask sloshing, every box I have ever sent made it with no problems.
Well you can't, obviously. But if you put the label on the end that you want up, and you hand it off at the shipping location that way, that's how it's going to travel a good part of the time at least, and surely when people are handling it, because they'd need to read the label. And employees handling it and getting suspicious is the problem here.
Those are the worst, in terms of noise. Laying bottles on their sides is a recipe for noise. I make sure to wrap each bottle in newspaper, and then stuff as much newspaper in-between the bottles as I can, just to deaden the noise a bit. But we also all need to remember that usually we're standing in a totally quiet room when we hear the noise. Drivers on a noisy truck are not so likely to hear anything, or care. No, they're not square. They're rectangular, so very unlikely that they'll be packed onto the truck any other way except laying flat, no matter where you put the label, I'm PRETTY sure that drivers don't care much about those arrows/labels. If this box ended up wrong, with as many labels as there are on it, I'm pretty sure any box can end up this way
Pro-Tip: Use rubber bands, NOT tape, to get the bubble wrap around the bottle. Makes reusing it a snap. Tape just makes it hard to open, and likely ripped apart after getting to the bottle. Huge waste.
