Nobody Makes a Reel About a Packing Table

Day 8 of building a company out of literal trash, and I did nothing you would want to watch.

No new product. No melting plastic. No rope getting cut into something clever. I built a proper packing table and I counted stock.

It was the least exciting day I have had in weeks. It might also be the most useful one.

The small business packing station nobody posts about

Before this, packing an order was a treasure hunt. Tape on one bench. Scissors somewhere else entirely. The right size box under a pile of rope. A thank you card and a sticker in a drawer I had to dig through with one hand.

Twenty minutes of faffing for a job that should take five. Multiply that by a busy week and you have lost most of an afternoon to looking for scissors.

Now it is one table with one job. Boxes in three sizes, tape, labels, tissue, cards, pens, all within arm's reach. An order lands, I stand up, it goes out. No hunting, no deciding, no thinking about it.

Here is the bit nobody tells you when you start. Everything after the checkout button is still the product. How fast it arrives. How it is wrapped. Whether the right thing is actually in the box. You can make the nicest recycled climbing rope belt in Scotland and still lose somebody because it took you nine days to post it.

A small business packing station is not a productivity hack. It is the last half of the thing you are selling.

Every size, every colour, on the shelf

The other half of the day was stock, and this one took longer.

I hold deep stock now. Belts in every waist size from 22 to 50 inches. Rope keychains, bracelets, coasters, dog leads, all sat there ready instead of living in my head as a maybe.

Two reasons for that.

One, big orders stop being scary. When a shop asks for forty pieces I can say yes, this week. Not give me six weeks and a lie down. That is the whole difference between getting the order and watching it go somewhere else.

Two, there is always something for somebody. Nothing kills a sale faster than a person finally deciding to buy and finding the thing is out of stock. You lose the order, and you lose a wee bit of trust along with it. They do not come back and check twice.

Every one of those is still made by hand by me, in a wee studio in Aberdeen, out of rope that used to hold a climber. Holding stock does not make it less handmade. It just means I made it on a Tuesday instead of making you wait.

Boring beats clever

The exciting stuff gets the views. Melting milk bottle caps. Cutting retired rope. The ugly prototypes that fail in front of everybody.

The boring stuff gets the business. A table. A shelf. A system that means today's order does not depend on how organised I happen to be feeling.

I am not naturally organised. That is exactly why the system has to do the work instead of me.

So if you are building something and today felt wasted because all you did was tidy up and count things, it was not wasted. That is the bit that lets the fun bit grow.

Not sure on a size? A Forma gift card starts at £10 and lets them pick their own.

Stay classy and remember,
Make Waste Useful.

George