Earlier this week we wrote about Sealed Air and their “Will it break” challenge. At IRX today, they were packaging an egg and challenging all comers to whack it with a hammer to see if they could break it. We witnessed many failures where the egg survived!
At Tamebay however we think a lab test is all well and good, but will Sealed Air’s packaging protect your precious porcelain and glass that someone’s just purchased for several hundred pounds. The only way to know for sure is to send a parcel through the Royal Mail and see what comes out at the other end.
Talk about squeaky bum time, but to give them all credit Sealed Air didn’t even blink and happily packaged up an egg for us to pop in the post.
First order of the day was for Professor Packaging to autograph the egg (“PP” naturally). We don’t want any egg swapping shenanigans, although in truth once the parcel is in Royal Mail’s system no one, not even Royal Mail themselves, will be able to trace it until it comes out of the local delivery office.
Once autographed, our precious egg (well not really so precious, eggs only cost 20p or so, but this one’s hopefully going to be my breakfast) was nestled into some Sealed Air packaging.
The packaging being demonstrated is Sealed Air’s Instapak® Simple™, an easy to use foam-in-bag system. The user can select how much foam should be in the bag (30%-99%) and then pop the bag in the box and it’ll expand to fill the available space. This means that you can safely pack an object of practically any size or shape and it’ll be securely cushioned against knocks.
All that was left for us to do was to scribble my address on the outside of the box and pop over to the Post Office (there’s one at Birmingham Airport which is a swift monorail ride from the NEC).
You might think that this is a pointless bit of fun, and in part you’d be right. However there’s a serious side to the experiment – an egg isn’t the most substantial object and it really doesn’t take too much of a knock to crack it. If Sealed Air can package an egg for a safe trip through the might of Royal Mail then you can be pretty sure that other delicate items will be similarly protected.
Of course we won’t know for a couple of days (we used 2nd Class post) what the results of our real life tests are – Sealed Air could yet end up with egg on their face. There’s only one question that Sealed Air, Tamebay and everyone watching at IRX wants to know… and that’s “Will It Break?”
We’ll let you know when it arrives.
8 Responses
We had a retired postie who used to come in morning to post/pack for us; He used an egg to demostrate just how how much packing is required to protect against a 3 foot fall to concrete- quite a lot! however, you have to look at the costs; maybe 1 in a 1000 will be dropped accidentally, the other 999 will be handled safely.
The problem with a self inflating system such as this, is when you have a heavy item- it stays on the bottom of the box whilst the packaging expands around the sides and the top. So you need a platform in the box to sit the item on; more messing about. Whatever you try, packing peanuts and bubble wrap still win the day.
Enjoy your breakfast
To be credible at least some other eggs should have been sent in various packages to see if they survived,
If this egg arrives undamaged it could be the quality and care of handling by Royal Mail and nothing to do with its packaging, ! LOL
Think the packaging is over kill lol
I used to sell a lot of second user laserjets. Weighing in at approx 18kg. empty 2 litre plastic juice bottles were an excellent packaging item amongst other things.
The box is massive compared to the tiny egg never mind the foam packaging, I agree with John I think the packaging is overkill.