Microwaving Sunglasses
Alex laughs. “Oh, I remember going through that, used to put my sunnies in the microwave.”
Alex owns and runs a direct to consumer sunglasses company. He’s been in Bali since before lock-down. He’s thinner than the last time I saw him. His teeth are like sun-bleached stones, a flash of white against bronzed skin. They’ve always been big and white and even.
He goes on, “used to try everything to hit my weight requirements, figured I could bake off the Chinese humidity.”
“Did it work?”
He laughs.
I’ve spent the last week thinking about box dimensions and the weight of meeples. I figured some stuff out, realized I was wrong, and at the end of it all realized that I am here to editorialize my process not to give any real tangible advice. But if you really want some advice, it’s that popular successful games manufacturers are pretty good at sizing their boxes, so if after reading the rest of this article you are still in doubt, go off and measure a Settlers of Catan box (11.63 x 9.38 x 3.12 inches) and rip it off.
Size Matters, Kind Of
Smaller and lighter is cheaper, but not linearly. A number of countries have flat rate shipping boxes (I don’t have a full list), this means that if your game fits in the box and you are shipping domestically, then you can ship with a low rate regardless of weight (within reason, typically 30 kg or ~70 lbs).
After talking with a few fulfillment providers and receiving their rate sheets, my understanding is that the flat rate shipping option only applies to domestic shipping (I would be happy to be proven wrong on this). Unless you have a massive launch, you will probably only have one fulfillment partner per region. So, if in the EU you partner with a German fulfillment company, you won’t get the benefit of Finnish flat rate shipping. My gut is that you should only really worry about fitting in US flat rate boxes.
Don’t forget that packaging adds bulk.
Oh, and even though you save on shipping, you might not want to shrink your game down to fit into a smaller box (more on that later).
Weight has a similar cut off at 2kg (a rule of thumb is game weight +0.25kg for packaging). Below is a price table for a European fulfillment company.
Volumetric Weight
Shipping something bulky but light will still cost you. Freight and shipping providers use something called Volumetric Weight. Take the volume of your package in cm and divide it by either 4,000 or 5,000 (depending on the provider), this will give you a kg equivalent. International shipping carriers apply the higher of actual weight and volumetric weight.
Let’s go back to Settler’s of Catan as an example. The game box dimensions are 11.63 x 9.38 x 3.12 inches. Let’s assume that with some bubble wrap, the game is shipped in a 14 x 12 x 3.5 inch box, which happens to be the same size as a US flat rate shipping box (wild coincidence). This will be about 8,647 cubic centimeters or 1.73 kg to 2.16 kg equivalent volumetric weight (depending on what your carrier divides by).
Catan weighs about 2.4 kg, adding packaging will get us close to 2.7 kg. So, a carrier would use the actual weight when calculating shipping costs.
This probably won’t matter to you, as most games have higher actual weights then volumetric weights, but if your game is surprisingly light and surprisingly bulky, it could be something to keep in mind.
Freight Choices - An Aside on Pallet Size
When shipping from manufacture, your game goes into cartons, the cartons go onto a pallet, and the pallet goes onto a boat.
I spent hours trying to find how large a carton is. It turns out that your manufacturer makes custom cartons for your game. All you need to worry about is that your dimensions aren’t super awkward so that with packaging (cardboard is thick) your game can sardine comfortably onto a pallet.
Pallets are 40” x 48” and can be up to 72” tall (apparently they aren’t ashamed of their height and rounding up).
About VAT
While researching all of this I came across a lot of information on VAT. While VAT would take up at least another article, since VAT and tariffs are so tied into freight and shipping, I wanted to provide a few links to resources:
1) Jamey Stegmaier as always hitting it out of the park with good content (link)
2) International Tax Review on VAT and crowdfunding (link)
3) International Tax Plaza on VAT guidelines (link)
Go Big or Go Home – Another Perspective
The Board Game Design Lab podcast had an excellent interview with AJ Brandon (Episode 212). AJ is a storefront manager at Board Game Bliss (link) and has a deep knowledge about what makes a game sell in brick and mortar and online retail.
AJ made the point that consumers have an expectation of game quality and price based on box size, and weight. That is a game with all the same components in a smaller box with lighter materials (plastic versus wooden meeples), will be perceived as lower quality and demanding a lower price point.
If you want to sell in retail, you need to consider your game size and weight not just from a fulfillment perspective but in terms of customer perception. I would assume that the same principal applies to e-commerce, that if a customer receives something that is smaller and lighter than they expected then regardless of quality their initial impression will be negative.
Smart People Have Already Figured All this Out
My background is in finance, so while I am good with predicting cashflows and assessing credit, I am woefully unknowledgeable about manufacturing, retail distribution, art direction, fulfillment, marketing, and a slew of other important issues that you need to know about when launching a board game. Luckily, there are a lot of phenomenal resources out there that to use as a starting point.
But, things are still sometimes confusing, and I figure that if I am confused by it, then others might have questions as well.
I think a lot of times I will roll my sleeves up, dig into a topic, learn a lot, and at the end of it all realize that it has been done before, well, and you could do worse than use the template of previous successful publications.
Chelsea and I are trying to launch a business though. Assuming that we have things figured out seems like a recipe for disaster. So we’ll keep on rolling up our sleeves, and keep on digging in, and most of the time we’ll land on tried and true practices, but maybe occasionally we’ll figure out something that works better for our specific needs. And at the end of all of it, I hope that we can provide a little bit of insight to other game designers and would be publishers who are walking the same path that we are.
Resources
1) Stonemaier Games on Shipping & Fulfillment (link)
2) The Board Game Design Lab podcast (Episode 223)
