A 100-Piece Order, Start to Finish: Notes from the Packing Table

Last Tuesday a carton came back from the courier with a handwritten note taped to the lid: received 39, invoice says 40. Nobody died. We counted again, found the missing unit sitting on the sealing table where someone had set it down to photograph, and shipped it out the next day. But that note is why I am writing this down, because a first order of a hundred pieces lives or dies on exactly this kind of detail.

Buyers usually see the tidy end of the process: a quotation, a proforma invoice, a tracking number. Here is the part in between, taken from a real 100-piece order that went out in October.

Monday: three models, one hundred pieces

The buyer is a distributor in Guadalajara selling into salon supply shops. First order, and he did what I would do in his position: instead of one model, three. Forty HY62 nail drills, thirty HY115 cleansing brushes, thirty HY33 mist sprayers. Enough of each to see what moves, not enough to be stuck with a pallet of the wrong thing.

Three models in one order sounds simple. It is not, and the reason is packing quantities. Every model packs to a fixed number per carton, and those numbers have nothing to do with the quantity you ordered.

Tuesday morning: the stock check

Before quoting, someone walks to the stock room and counts. On this order the forty HY62 were ready from the previous production run. The HY115 were in stock but in mixed retail color boxes, which is fine for neutral packing and not fine if a customer has already printed a box design. The HY33 needed two days on the line because the green colourway was out.

This is the part of a small order that surprises people most. A factory with a hundred models in a catalogue is not a warehouse with a hundred models on the shelf. Some are in stock, some are mid-production, some sit between runs. Ask which is which before you plan a launch date, and ask it in writing.

Tuesday afternoon: cartons are not divisible

The HY62 packed cleanly. Forty pieces, forty to a carton, finished. The HY115 packs sixty per carton, so thirty pieces filled half a carton, and half a carton leaves as a partial carton with a fill board and extra tape. The HY33 packs 250 per carton, which meant thirty units travelled in a small export box of their own.

None of that is a problem. What causes problems is a buyer calculating freight on the assumption that a hundred pieces equals one carton. It never does. Volume is set by the packing quantity, not by the order quantity.

Wednesday: the weight surprise

We weighed the finished shipment before booking the courier, and the actual gross weight came out about 1.9 kg heavier than the figure on the quotation. Not because anything was misquoted: the quotation used net product weight, while the scale included color boxes, fill boards, desiccant, tape and the carton itself. Roughly nine kilos of product, eleven kilos of shipment. On air freight that gap is money, and the buyer had budgeted on the smaller number.

Every product page on this site lists packed weight next to device weight for exactly this reason. If a supplier gives you one weight without saying whether it is gross or net, ask again, and ask per carton.

Wednesday night: the documents

Rechargeable devices do not fly without a battery declaration. Two cartons on this shipment, one HY62 and one HY115, were flagged for lithium battery content, so the MSDS and the UN38.3 report travelled with the invoice and the packing list. The courier asked for them at pickup, not at the destination, which is precisely when you want to be holding them rather than chasing them.

What went wrong, and what changed

The miscount happened at the sealing station. Two people pack, one seals. The person sealing had set aside a unit to photograph for a customer and never put it back. It ended up filed in the photo folder instead of the carton. We now count once at packing and once at sealing, out loud, in front of the box, and write the second count on the label in marker. Two minutes per order. Cheaper than a resent parcel and an apology.

The weight gap is now printed on our quotations: net and gross, per carton. It cost nothing to add once we had put a few shipments on a scale, and it removes the "why is the freight higher than you quoted" email that used to arrive two weeks later.

If you are the one ordering 100 pieces

Ask for carton dimensions and packed weight per model before comparing freight quotes. Expect partial cartons and do not read them as sloppiness. Confirm stock model by model instead of asking whether the catalogue is available. And if a supplier tells you a hundred pieces will fit in one carton, check the packing quantity first, because it usually means they have not shipped that model in a while.

One last thing, less technical. A hundred pieces is a real order here, not a nuisance. It is how most of our regular customers started, which is why the packing table has a shelf for small orders instead of a rule against them.