Part of being in business is learning how to crush competition.  Sometimes the answer to this is simply by saving money in ways they are not! There are so many different ways to be efficient and to start changing the way our company works.  I truly enjoy being apart of victories and understand that our failures and lost money are a reminder about being wise and thinking about all the different areas of being successful.  Lately, with the bonus of eCommerce starting to become one of the biggest sales industries we have been working hard to be successful at shipping our items at the best price and most safe for our clients.  This area is something that we want to really narrow down our costs and possible competitive advantages against our competition. Now, I want to go over how we did this and lowered our prices to be more competitive. 

It can be the little things that actually end up being some of the biggest cost savings and that is no joke.  It turns out that tape is a big deal when it comes to shipping and getting the best quality and lowest costs are easier said than done.  To be honest I really only thought that packing tape existed in one flavor.  But there are different thicknesses and types that hold all kinds of different weights.  There is also gum tape and it is water activated and is much stronger and can be super fast as well once you program a machine to cut it to the perfect length. No way you could have told me this would have worked so well a few years ago, but it does.

The new water-based tape saved us using tons of strips on our regular packing tape.  This was because some of our products are really heavy and some of our employees get a little excited and go overboard on taping. But it turns out that in some cases it was needed with the type of tape we were using.  So we ended up calling up a packaging supplies store and asking what might work best for our company.  It turns out that for the cardboard boxes that we were using we could incorporate gum tape.  What this really did was cut back out the use of tape and saved up thousands and thousand by using less.  The new stuff costs more per strip but we were using 14 strips less per box! That adds up!

Now it was different because how you actually end up using a gum tape dispenser is simply having a machine that wets and cuts the tape to a certain length.  Our machine programs the legnth and width of each box that we use.  So we can choose to have it cut 3 pieces of tape and have it done within a few seconds.  It then is put on the package and it perfectly fits each time giving the perfect amount of tape.  Once we programmed the right lengths our team was flying through packages and we were super happy that they enjoyed not having to lean over and tape all those extra times.  It really can be something small that changes your entire company and makes you a dominant player in your industry. So keep an eye out!