How do you move 22 pallets weighing over 1,900 lbs each when you’re a start-up beverage company? One at a time. After finally producing Heart Juice, the next step was to move the pallets to our warehouse. There was one problem: how are we going to move a 1,900 lb pallet? Let alone, move 22 of them? In tackling this awesome predicament, we decided to go back to one of our founding values: bootstrapping.
In this case, we had just recently bought a “gently” used cargo van from Craigslist so we thought that we might as well put it to good use; unfortunately, the van’s payload could only carry one pallet at a time. As painstaking as we both knew it would be to make 22 trips to and from our warehouses, there was really no other cost-effective alternative to hauling the pallets ourselves.
Loading the pallets onto the van was the easy part but driving a van with a 2,000 lb payload 30 miles one-way in New Jersey was another story. When we finally arrived at our warehouse, the only way we could offload the pallet from the van was to break the pallet down then rebuild the pallet case by case one at a time.
Looking back at what we’ve done so far, we wouldn’t want it any other way. Especially since we’ve learned more about the industry and what it will take to make things work.
