Reducing freight volume on a dish rack programme by switching to KD
A European kitchenware importer was paying to ship air on a welded dish rack. Re-engineering the frame as knock-down cut container volume without changing the retail appearance.
- TBD
- Container volume reduction — confirm with engineering
- TBD
- Landed cost change — confirm with commercial team
Challenge
The existing welded dish rack shipped as a fixed frame. Because a three-sided wire frame is mostly empty space, the importer was paying ocean freight on air. With container costs rising, the landed cost of the SKU became uncompetitive against locally sourced alternatives.
What we did
We redesigned the frame as a knock-down assembly with two locking tabs and a revised rail joint, so the finished product still presents as a single rigid unit once assembled, but ships flat. Tooling was revised for the new joint and the packaging was re-cut to the flat footprint.
Result
- Flat-pack carton replaced the fixed-frame carton
- Assembly is tool-free and takes under a minute
- Retail appearance unchanged once assembled
Why this is worth reading
Freight is often the largest controllable cost on a bulky wire product, and it is usually ignored during sampling because samples ship by courier.
The trade-off we had to solve
Knocking a frame down is easy. Keeping it rigid enough that the retail customer does not perceive a downgrade is not. The locking tabs and revised rail joint were the whole project.
⚠️ 占位内容：客户已匿名化；两项指标为 TBD， 禁止为了页面好看而填入未经确认的百分比。
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