Shipping

Transport closes the cycle and inherits all of its risk: a piece machined, finished and packed with care can be compromised in an hour of badly organised travel. That is why shipping is planned together with production and not afterwards, taking account of how bulky the piece is, how it has been packed and where it has to arrive.

The vehicle is chosen for the piece. A load of palletised, stackable components travels on different logic from a single two-metre element that cannot be laid down. The type of vehicle changes, so does the way it is stowed, the restraint inside the body and sometimes the need for a tail lift at unloading. This is information to have beforehand: discovering at delivery that the site has no way of unloading means sending the goods back, with all the handling risk that implies.

The second variable is time. In bespoke furniture, deliveries are almost always tied to an installation on site, where every day has a cost that is not the cost of transport. An agreed date that is kept is worth more than a fast but uncertain delivery, and when something slips the useful thing is to know in advance, not on the day.

Documents travel with the goods: delivery note, package list, component identification for knocked-down pieces, assembly instructions where needed. Goods that arrive without usable documentation stand still, and that delay is paid for on site.

On delivery the check is on the integrity of the packages and on their correspondence with the order: any damage must be recorded immediately, because documented at that moment it gets resolved, and discovered later it becomes an argument. If the piece arrives as it left, the whole cycle has worked — from design engineering to the crate opened on site. And that is the only verification that really counts: everything decided in design, welded, burnished, painted and packed exists only if it arrives intact.