Tall tales about long boxes

As has been mentioned before on this blog, and will undoubtedly be mentioned again, if you’re answering the phone in Davpack’s Sales office, you should always be prepared for some very odd questions. For example, I was once asked if we had any long cardboard boxes that would hold a walking stick suitable for a person of average height.

Now, I was sure we did, because we’ve got well over 100 long boxes of different size and strength, but I quite reasonably thought that I would be able to help the Customer better if I knew exactly how long the walking stick in question actually was. Unfortunately, neither the walking stick nor the person of reputedly average height were immediately to hand for the caller, so I asked her to try again when she was able to give us more precise measurements. I wanted to make the sale, but it would have done neither of us any good to have sold her the wrong sized box.

 

Try our extra long boxes for size!

Apparently, the average British male stands 176.8cm (5’ 9.6”) high and the average woman 163.7cm (5’ 4.4”). I’ve never used a walking stick, but I’m guessing (by just pretending to use one, a sight that caused a colleague passing my office to stop and do a double take) that, to be comfortable and useful, it would need to be about half your height. If I’m correct in that assumption, that would mean that if the absent stick owner were indeed of average height, then we would have needed a box somewhere between 820 and 890mm long, which would have been no problem.

Our longest box is actually 1830mm (6’) long, which means that it’s just the right length to hold a walking stick for an Asian elephant. Whether it would be able to hold one strong enough to be used by an Asian elephant is an entirely different matter. By the way, if you add one of our lids and turn it into a telescopic box, you could extend that to over 3000mm (10’), making it an extra long box that could hold a walking stick suitable for a giraffe, which is of course the tallest animal on earth.

 

And when the longest still isn’t long enough…

Having found such a long box, you might think we had nowhere else to go with this theme. As it happens, we stock an item called Fan Folded Corrugated Cardboard. This is an incredibly useful thing that you can cut down to make your own extra long boxes and make them just about as long as you want them. And as it comes in sheets of up to 366 metres, that can be pretty long. To put it into context, the Empire State Building (if you ignore the spire) is just 15 metres longer!

The other beauty of the fan folded cardboard is that if you need to package lots of items of varying lengths – if you were selling walking sticks to the entire animal kingdom, for example – it’s a much more cost effective solution than buying multiple packs of different sized boxes!

If you’d like to know more about our long cardboard boxes, or if you’d like to know what length walking stick you’d need for a range of different animals, from a gnat to a gnu, why not give our Sales team a call on 0844 800 9844?

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Dave Smith

With a background that has included spells in marketing and editorial management in the publishing and performing arts industries, Dave is now a valued member of Davpack’s marketing team, where he is our lead blogger and senior copywriter. Still relatively new to the business, he will be aiming to look at the world of cardboard boxes and packaging materials from a slightly different angle to the usual. Davpack

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