Packaging World

Home office/entertainment furniture maker eliminates replacement glass breakage during shipping with a custom solution that combines laminated paperboard and honeycomb.

When the product you’re shipping is panels of replacement glass for entertainment centers, TV stands, and desks, and one out of six panels is breaking in transit, that’s a problem that needs to be solved.

Z-Line Designs, a San Ramon, CA-based manufacturer of home office and home entertainment furniture, sells its products through big box stores in North America. It also ships the replacement glass panels for its products directly from a warehouse in Livermore, CA, to customers throughout the U.S. and Canada using a leading shipping company.

When Jim Robinson, director of warehouse operations and customer service in Livermore, started experiencing a sudden hike in breakage rates—as high as 16% at one point—something had to be done.

Thanks to some detective work by Robinson, the problem was finally identified. Working with edge protection vendor Laminations® and with distributor Landsberg Co., a division of Amcor Packaging Distribution, Robinson has been able to bring that 16% breakage rate to zero, using a custom combination of UChannel® three-sided edge protectors and honeycomb.

Bigger products require better protection

Z-Line used to ship its replacement glass pieces packed in expanded polystyrene foam inside corrugated boxes. That packaging combination had been passing the shipper’s drop tests, which require the pieces to survive 10 drops.

Then the breakage rate began to creep up, peaking in February 2011 at 16%. Replacing one out of six glass pieces because of shipping damage was obviously unacceptable for both Z-Line and the shipper.

“We went through a long process of trying to figure out why, all of a sudden, we were having so much breakage,” says Robinson, who at first thought the shipping company was handling the packages too roughly. When that turned out not to be the case, he put on his detective hat and began to dig deeper into the problem.

“What we finally came up with was that our products had been getting bigger over the years,” he explains. Z-Line entertainment centers and TV stands—and the accompanying glass panels and tops—had gradually grown to accommodate typical TV sizes that had gone from 42-in. screens to 65 in.

“At the same time, we also wanted to get away from EPS and go with something more environmentally friendly and cost-effective,” says Robinson. “We were paying to dump a 40-yard dumpster of scrap EPS every two and a half months in the landfill, and the cost of EPS disposal was going through the roof.” Customers ordering replacement glass panels were also getting more environmentally conscious and increasingly vexed by the disposal challenges and mess of EPS foam, he adds.

Working with Landsberg representative Kendra Danneil and Landsberg designer Tom Smurthwaite, Robinson switched to a pack that sandwiched the glass between sheets of honeycomb, cut two inches larger than the panels to provide a buffer zone inside the corrugated box. The honeycomb was strapped to prevent slippage.

“But we still weren’t passing the drop test, and we couldn’t understand why,” says