In 2016, Michael Sloan and his dad John started John Michael Studio in South Carolina, building premium outdoor kitchens. When their first big order came in from a customer in California, the shop celebrated. Then they looked at the finished cabinetry and realized nobody had thought about how it was actually going to get there.
“We slapped together some pallets and I called a guy who had some background in boxes,” Sloan says. What they came up with, a cabinet strapped to a pallet with a printed box dropped over the top, held up fine on the shop floor. It looked sharp, too, with their logo right on the outside. The problem was what was inside it: mostly air. Gaps of four, six, sometimes eight inches sat between the cabinet and the box on a trip that ran roughly 2,300 miles, with two to four stops, usually overnight, handled by forklift operators who had never seen a John Michael Studio cabinet and had no reason to treat it any differently than anything else on the dock.
That setup carried the company for three or four years. It also quietly ate into the bottom line every time a cabinet arrived scratched, dented, or worse.
“We realized really early on, my gosh, we’re going to have to take the packaging and the logistics of this company very seriously,” Sloan says, “because we were losing money on the damages. We really had no protection with our cabinets when we were shipping.”
Why a Southeast Packaging Company Was the Right Partner
John Michael Studio had grown well past outdoor kitchens by the time they brought Morrisette Packaging in.
The shop now builds full indoor kitchens, outdoor kitchens, closet systems, pantries, and vanities, all manufactured in-house, and all shipped on the same tight tolerances for damage that come with selling at the top of the cabinetry market.
Some jobs travel three or four thousand miles to reach customers in Europe and South America.
Every one of them still has to survive a forklift.
That’s where being a Southeast packaging company mattered. Morrisette Packaging’s design team could get on-site in South Carolina, look at the actual cabinets coming off the line, and build around them rather than sending a catalog box and hoping it fit. Over a handful of design sessions, the team walked the current packaging piece by piece: what was holding up, what wasn’t, and where the money was actually being lost.
Ready to see what a design session like that would turn up for your product? Schedule a free coffee and consultation with one of our packaging specialists today.
The Engineering: Corrugated, Honeycomb & Where Damage Actually Happens
The redesign started with a simple observation: damage almost never hits the flat side of a cabinet. It hits the corners and edges. So that’s where the protection went.
Morrisette Packaging, working as the corrugated manufacturer and structural designer for the project, built custom corner protectors and paired them with engineered honeycomb panels cut to a specific height. That height does two jobs at once: it holds the cabinet strapped down tight and compact for the ride, while creating a floating, cushioned air gap, in some spots as much as two inches, between the product and the outside of the box. When a forklift or a shifting pallet bumps the box, the honeycomb and corrugated layers absorb and compress before the impact ever reaches the cabinet. In other spots, a laminated corner sleeve slides directly over the top edges, protecting three sides at once with the same air-gap-and-cushion logic.
Because John Michael Studio builds a wide range of cabinet sizes, the packaging couldn’t just work for one line. It had to flex across the whole product range while still using shared components, so the design stayed customized without turning into a different box for every SKU.
The Results: Fewer Damage Claims and a Better Trip for Cabinets Going Further
Four years later, the damage rate on John Michael Studio’s shipments has come down significantly. That’s real money back for a company whose customers pay a premium for bespoke craftsmanship and don’t have much patience for a cabinet that shows up chipped.
“The math just checks out, far and away,” Sloan says of the added investment in packaging up front. “Not only were we getting minimized damage from the new packaging, but our customer experience was also a lot better, because our jobs were getting there safely, getting there intact, and ready to install.”
For a growing manufacturer sending high-end products thousands of miles into the hands of forklift operators who will never know what’s inside the box, that’s the whole point of packaging engineering: protect the product before it ever leaves the dock, so the brand’s reputation arrives in one piece too.
If your product is outgrowing the packaging you started with, talk to a Morrisette packaging specialist about a design session for your line. It’s the same process that got John Michael Studio’s damage rate under control, and it starts with a free coffee, not a sales pitch.
