Have you ever ordered a single pillow (or maybe even a few pillows) and been annoyed to find the shipping fee higher than the cost of the pillows? There are several reasons why small order costs are high, but there's a way to eliminate some of those costs.

Understanding Why Small Order Costs are High

One aspect of cost is labor. We have six people involved in every order, since we custom make each pillow as it's ordered. Someone keys in the important information on your order, including your shipping information. One person cuts the fabric for your forms, then another person sews the pillow shell together.  One person stuffs the pillow, followed by someone who sews it shut. Finally, someone packs up the box and sends your order to UPS. When we have a large number of the same size form, we can streamline this process and save time. However, when making just a few forms (or a single form), it takes much longer (and therefore costs more).

Sure, we could change our business and stock lots of pillows like many of our competitors...except that we wouldn't have all these unique sizes and pillow costs would have to go up to pay for bulk inventory and warehousing.

Another aspect of cost is shipping. We've talked before about pillow shipping, and how it's surprisingly costly since a huge part of the shipping charge is based on box dimensions (not weight as most people assume). Beyond that factor, a small order doesn't fill up a box, so there's effectively wasted space. Since a partially filled box costs the same as a full box, your cost of shipping is higher per pillow.

Sure, we could get more boxes to handle small orders...except that managing lots of different box sizes would require extra money, space, and time so pillow costs would have to go up to account for these costs.

Eliminating the Pain of Small Order Costs

We often hear suggestions about folding the shipping costs into the product in order to offer "free" shipping. If we set our prices based on the cost of selling a single pillow, then the cost of purchasing multiple pillows would go up astronomically. We don't want to punish our large order customers, so we keep the price of our pillows reasonable and keep the shipping charge manageable. 

The best way to minimize the effect of high shipping is to order more pillows at one time (you can also get product price discounts for ordering 20 or more forms). If you buy a full case of pillows, you will get the most pillows for the shipping cost. You can purchase pillows for multiple projects at once (since we make them easy to store with our vacuum-sealing process). You can also get together with friends to combine all your orders into one shipment.