Packaging and Shipping Your Fine Furniture: White Glove or DIY?
We received our first fine furniture order from Alaska last week and that makes the 50th state we will have delivered furniture to. Once the bedroom set arrives safely, we'll have to have celebrate this milestone with a little party.
It's actually a pretty exciting accomplishment for a small company like Vermont Woods Studios Furniture.
It turns out that packaging and safely shipping your fine furniture is the most challenging part of our business and we're always working to make the system work better, faster, cheaper and stress-free.
Our preferred method of shipping fine furniture is to blanket wrap it and send it "white glove delivery" with the world's number one, award-winning furniture shipper: Clark and Reid. They are the best. When you receive your furniture from C&R, they carefully bring it into your home, set it up wherever you like, help you inspect it for any shipping damage and remove the wrapping. You do nothing but smile.
However Clark and Reid is not the fastest or the cheapest. So when customer's are in a hurry and need to save money, we can sometimes (depending on size) package and ship their furniture via common carrier or even FedEx to get it there faster and cheaper. We call it DIY delivery and it has just recently been made possible with advances in packaging technology.
If your order is eligible for DIY packaging and shippping, we'll let you know. As you can see, it's not your typical UPS delivery. It took 4 of us to wrestle this filing cabinet out of the box.
I always try to emphasize to our customers that unpackaging and moving solid wood furniture is not easy. It's heavy (often >100#) and if it has doors or drawers, you want to be especially careful not to damage or unbalance them. If you're a "handyman" DIY can save you money and time but for most customers I wholeheartedly recommend the luxury and peace of mind that white glove delivery brings.
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Packaging, indeed is a tricky challenge and requires following of strict regulations to preven the furniture from damages or scrathes- a wrapping material should not be saved, the items need to be carefully and safely packed for a careful transportation, so I personally prefer to use the services of professionals in the field.