The art and science of shipping is a mystery to most of us. You wrap up a package, call or drop by the shipper, and poof, it is off. Most of the time, it reaches its destination, and you never have to think to worry about it. But when you think (or worry) about it, the fact that most what we ship gets where it’s going is pretty amazing.

We at The Kingswood Company ship stuff – A LOT OF STUFF. Our shipper is integral to what we do, so when FedEx offered us a tour of their facility, we jumped at the chance to see the process in action! About half of all the boxes we ship and about 95 percent of all our shipments are shipped via FedEx. As a team, we were thrilled to learn about how our product is handled once it leaves our dock.

We got to watch “the sort” from way up on high, which was fascinating; this terminal processes 15,000 packages per shift during regular business and up to 30,000 packages during the holidays. We also got to see a truck loaded with some of our product. Some of our boxes were upside down (yikes, it’s full of liquids!), but that was an opportunity to talk with the Terminal Manager about the importance of keeping our boxes upright.

We know that is not usually a problem for FedEx, because very, very few of our boxes come back to us with damage or leaking. This is helped by the very sophisticated packaging we have developed to help prevent leaking. In addition, 99.8 percent of our boxes are delivered on time – an impressive statistic that helps us meet our very high customer service standards.

Thanks to the folks at FedEx for taking the time to show us around. It was an experience we won’t soon forget.