In this day and age, a lot of people operate small business from their homes.  A lot of these companies are purely internet run, and so they involve a tremendous amount of shipping, which means an even more tremendous amount of shipping supplies.  The thing is, just because someone is a savvy business person doesn’t mean they are well organized.  If you have a private business there are probably a lot of areas that you aren’t great in, but you can still have a business because you know how to run one.  And if you are really that great of a business person you will probably hire someone else to do the stuff you aren’t that good at.  Or you will consult the internet.

Here are some tips for how to organize all of those shipping supplies so that you can have a shipping room that anyone could be proud of:

Become friends with IKEA.  You may not live right next to one, but most of us live within a couple hours of one.  They literally have the best furniture for when it comes to organizing.  Start with tall shelves.  IKEA makes shelves that go from floor to ceiling, and are solid enough to hold up against life.  So the first key to organizing your shipping supplies is having the right props.  Making piles on the floor just isn’t going to cut it.

Have the shipping supplies.  There is no point in organizing something if you aren’t well-stocked in it, but you need to be well-stocked in shipping supplies if your business depends on it.  So instead of making small purchases here and there, find an online retailer that you can order in bulk from and then do a monthly or quarterly order of the same thing.  Stack those different shipping supplies in segregated shelves: like size bubble mailers with like size bubble mailers, and the same with boxes.

Treat them appropriately.  If you have bubble wrap, don’t put your bubble wrap on the floor and just unwind it vertically when you need it.  There are plenty of closet rod systems from Lowe’s or Wal Mart that can make it really easy for you to hang the bubble wrap up, thus clearing up space on the ground for other necessary things that a shipping closet might need, like recycling bins.  And make sure that you put smaller items like tape or Sharpies in bins so that they aren’t falling all over the place.

If you’ve launched a small business than you know that it tends to be a lot more complicated than you might think.  It’s not as simple as just coming up with an idea.  You also have to come up with a “brand”.  “Branding” is kind of a big thing these days, and don’t worry, no animals are harmed in the process.  Instead, the word “branding” has been borrowed from that rather unfortunate practice of burning an identifier into the hide of an animal, and has become the process of making something look exclusively yours.  Nowadays, an average individual can make a pretty awesome-looking website.  I know someone who’s step-dad puts together websites, and he charges somewhere around five grand.  Five grand?  Someone pass me my smelling salts.  Thankfully there are plenty of online domains that allow you purchase a dot com and, make it super easy to put together, for like a hundred bucks a year.  Ahhh, much better…

What about packaging supplies?  Don’t be fooled, packaging supplies are more than just a box and some tissue paper.  It’s important to find somewhere that you can get them at wholesale prices.  An online source is usually best for this.  What about business cards?  It’s a good idea to include business cards, or maybe a business magnet, in with an order that you’ve sent.  Flyers and catalogs can all be part of the packaging process.  Not to mention, you don’t have to settle for boring old, everyday packaging supplies.  Go the extra mile and get some drawstring muslin bags, or metal tins, or even ribbon.

One of the most crucial components of your “brand” is your logo.  It’s a good idea to really take some time on this.  Put your heads together with some friends.  See what they think of your idea.  Next, if you can’t design your own logo on your own, pay the money to have someone do it.  You don’t want to wind up with a pathetic looking sticker that you obviously put together using the outlines from Microsoft paint.

We’ve already talked about a lot of the most obvious parts of owning a small business, like packaging supplies and business cards.  Here are a couple other things to consider, that might not have seemed so obvious before you launched into this whole thing: custom garment labels if you are designing clothes, custom rubber stamps to “brand” your product, or custom leather/metal tags for your homemade handbags.

Random fact of the day: jellyfish are terrifying.  That isn’t the actual random fact, although it is a fact.  The actual random fact is that Portuguese jellyfish can grow up to a mile long.  Can you imagine the type of prey they catch with that kind of war path?  A mile long?  I mean, that’s over five thousand feet!  It’s just insane.  No creature on the face of this earth should ever be that long.  Ever.  It makes me never want to go into the ocean ever again.  Regular jellyfish are scary enough.  Ones that are a mile long kind of make me think someone has to be making this up.

How many of you would would rather deal with a Portuguese jellyfish over moving?  (Take a minute to think about moving supplies in comparison with giant tentacles a mile long.  Oh, and the tentacles are electrically charged.) I’m thinking not very many.  I’m thinking not very many at all.  And the ones that think they would have either never moved or they’ve moved no less than one thousand times, and each time was a nightmare.  Or they might be descendants of Apollo or Achilles, in which case a Portuguese jellyfish is nothing compared to the skolopendra.

As for myself, I would rather move every year of my life if it keeps me far away from terrifying nautical creatures.  I don’t even really like fish that much, to be honest.  Although I do have this really cute memory of swimming in a beach in Guam, that crystal clear water and almost white sand, and there were these adorable little tropical fish, like Nemos and Dories, and they were diving into my feet trying to eat my toes.  As my cousin likes to say: totes adorbs.  But you know what isn’t totes adorbs?  Moving supplies.  I’m not gonna lie, as much as I don’t like fish I don’t like piles of boxes and stacks of tape either.  I don’t like the smell of permanent marker or the sound of it squeaking on cardboard.  And yet, still, moving supplies are always the better option.  Sometimes you just have to go with the lesser of two evils.  Anything on land is preferable to something out of your element, anyway.  It’s like this book I’m reading about World War II bomber crews, and the insane amount of stress that came with their job.

I’ll take good old terra firma, thank you very much.

When it comes to getting your hands on some quality packing supplies there are a couple things that you should take into consideration.  For one, they don’t have to be a name-brand, or sold by a large corporation.  For example, U-Haul sells quality packing supplies, but they also cost far more than anything you are going to buy anywhere else.  I mean, I was downright appalled at UHaul’s prices.  Over three dollars for one, medium-sized box?  Get out of town!  If you were to buy a bundle of medium-sized boxes from an online store you could get about twenty-five for around thirty dollars.  That’s two and a half times more than you would be getting at UHaul’s prices.  Also, the well-known home improvement stores sells quality packing supplies, but they are also upcharged, and there is hardly any variety to speak of.  Like three.  As in, three different sizes of to choose, and three different kinds of tape to choose from.

A major component to choosing quality packing supplies is considering what you need.  A lot of times people get frustrated with the materials they are using when it turns out they aren’t using the right kinds of material to begin with.  They think that the material must be crappy, and don’t consider that maybe they made a poor choice (no offense).  If you are moving some heavy stuff, be sure to get heavy-duty boxes.  This way you save yourself the pain and heartache that comes when boxes start tearing and stuff starts breaking.  If you need something to be properly cushioned, don’t just use an old hand towel wrapped around three or four different coffee mugs that you got handed down from your grandmother, use bubble wrap.

Have you ever watched a moving company?  They use blankets to drape over furniture.  They bring rolls of shrink wrap to wrap around awkwardly shaped items.  They use inches of brown paper to protect things inside of boxes.  They use heavy duty tape that doesn’t peel off in a sliver every time you try to use it.  You wind up paying out the wazz for them to do all of this, which is why I recommend that you do it all yourself, but the point is that they know the “quality” in “quality shipping supplies” really lies in what the job calls for, having that on hand, and then using everything appropriately.

If you have read the title to this little bit of content you have automatically and simultaneously asked yourself a question: what do packaging supplies have to do with game shows? Of course normally we would probably say, “Not that much, obviously,” or “I don’t know” or even, “Who cares.” There would probably be that one person who likes to try to have an educated answer for everything and so he would say something like, “Well, figuratively speaking, everything that the game show received in the mail would be directly related to packaging supplies, so you might consider that packaging supplies have a lot to do with game shows, they are just more behind the scenes.”

Well, no one wants to hear that kind of BS.

The actual and right answer to this question is Wheel of Fortune. That’s right. Just the other day my cousin sent me a screenshot of a Wheel of Fortune puzzle and said, “Ready, Go!” This was obviously to mean that I was to go ahead and try to figure out the puzzle. So I did. I like to think that my brain works quickly, and that it recognizes letters in an instant, and has a bit of a word-solving prowess. The problem is, though, that I try to fill in the blanks automatically and then I am left with these ridiculous phrases continuously trying to be right. It’s like when you are playing Pictionary and the other person keeps saying the exact same thing for your drawing when you’ve shaken your head “no” every single time. If it was magically going to morph into “candle in the wind” I would have said “yes” and then this round would be over…

The more my cousin insisted that I would never guess it but that I would hate myself when I found out, the more determined I became to discover the answer. In the end, the only thing that I could come up with was “apologizing profusely” and that just didn’t add up with the letters on the screen. And it was pretty lame. When I finally swallowed my pride and told her to tell me, she sent me a screen shot of the finished puzzle: packaging supplies. Why would it make me hate myself to not have gotten that? While hating myself was a gross overstatement, to be sure, I was definitely embarrassed. You see, I write about packaging supplies every single week!