Packing and Shipping Headaches

Very Large Freestanding Double Wind Chime
by Coast Chimes

I used to make quite a few of these extra-large wind chime with beach stone bases: they are really beautiful! But shipping them is not a lot of fun! The beach stone base on the one pictures weighs over 33 pounds. The copper support is over 4 feet tall. The 2 glass strands are somewhat fragile. Packing this to ship is, in one word, nightmarish.

I have taken apart a shipped a fair number of these, and have thus learned some tricks to simplify the process. Even so, ugh! Yesterday when I packed it, I still made some novice mistakes. For example, I spent a long time cutting out 2 pieces of thick cardboard to seal the copper support, and then wrapped that completely in heavy paper. So far, so good, but I forgot I should have measured it before neatly wrapping it in shipping paper. When I measured it, I found it to be oversized, meaning the postage, just on this one part, would have been nearly $300! So I had to get my sharp knife and carve up my neat package, and use a lot more tape and time. In the end, I succeeded, getting it down to a size where it could ship as a normal parcel ($55), but tons of extra work, and a package that did not look quite as neat as I would have like.

Second mistake was wrapping the glass, chimes and copper support, before weighing the beach stone base! It could easily have been overweight, making the whole process a waste. How lucky that the stone came in below the maximum, and thus shippable (for almost $100). 

To top off the whole hassle, the buyer of this wind chime discovered it through Etsy's new offsite ads, so they charged me over $80 extra. I am happy the ads work, but wow, that's a pretty hefty fee! (That's on top of the usual seller / listing fees).

Oh well, it's shipped off now, I hope that it arrives in great condition, I hope the customer loves it. Probably in a few weeks I will get the itch to make some more of this style. Pain is quickly forgotten?