It is undeniable that talking about boxes, in general, is talking about a business that today, with the massive use of the Internet, has become an indispensable element when it comes to sending goods from one place to another. Remember that electronic commerce has exploded and more and more entrepreneurs require this element to send their products to their customers … of course … being made of cardboard. But what about those that are made or made of wood such as the ones made by BlueRose Packaging?
In the first instance, we must take into account that the use of cardboard for luxury or normal rigid boxes was a partly evolutionary process and partly derived from certain disadvantages that wood offered. Because if something is clear, it is that both, wood and cardboard, come from the same raw material: trees. Therefore we cannot say that the preference of one over the other came from this particular circumstance. No. The reasons were other.
To begin to understand this circumstance, one of the reasons why wood-based boxes were stopped is that because they had to be nailed in order to seal them when they were opened, the common denominator was that they would break and therefore lose their usefulness. In addition, its production cost was not low and the impracticality of use and manufacture in different sizes made it disappear, giving way to a new material that, in addition to having a lower cost, had a simpler and faster recycling facility. Not to mention that it could be easily reused.
Today, and to respond to the issue that has brought us here, the use of wood for this purpose has only been left for luxury rigid boxes or for large boxes that have to protect large and extremely large equipment. As we said before, this is due to the fact that the cost and the impracticality of making wooden boxes have led to the change to cardboard.
In fact, those rigid boxes made of wood for luxury items such as liquors or jewelry are handmade and therefore have a much higher cost. In addition, there are many demands today regarding the use of wood and cardboard, among which is the fact of using wood only in adequate quantities (remember that the majority of cardboard boxes and for precisely shipping uses are made of cardboard recycled by so it is not necessary to use new raw material for this purpose).
Another factor that greatly influenced the migration from wood to cardboard is the constant growth in the cost of shipments, whether they are by sea, air, or land, and the fact that this cost is associated with its weight and not so much with the size so when occupying wooden boxes they add an additional weight that must be paid. While cardboard, having a rigidity close to the wood, does not have the same weight and therefore reduces the cost of such transport.
In conclusion, we must be very clear that nowadays it is not very profitable to manufacture wooden boxes because its use is very limited and therefore the market niche is quite small, almost becoming a manufactured item and for very specific uses. However, there is always a market for wooden boxes or crates. Companies such as the shipping crate supplier Riverside CA are still operating, of course, not without reason. The wooden boxes have advantages that the cardboard ones do not have.
Photo by Diana Polekhina