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Lip care
All Containers›Shop by use case›Lip care›Tubes and pots›Case packing and shippingShop all lip care →
Tubes and pots

Case packing and shipping

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

Lip balm is the easiest product in the estate to ship and the easiest to ruin in transit, for the same reason: it is small and it melts.

Small, light and heat-sensitive

A case of several hundred tubes is a parcel, not a pallet, which makes distribution cheap and simple.

The constraint is entirely thermal. Nothing else about the product is fragile.

The heat problem

A delivery van in July runs far above the point at which any lip balm softens. A mailbox in the sun is worse.

A softened tube does not usually return to its original shape: it slumps, the top rounds over, and it may bloom on cooling. The customer receives a product that looks defective.

Which makes the summer formula a shipping decision as much as a product one, and makes a note on the dispatch page about warm-weather delivery a reasonable thing to write.

Packing a case

Upright, in a divider or a tray, so tubes do not lie on their sides. A tube on its side that softens sets with a flat.

Full cases rather than part-full with space to move, and an outer that is not black, because a dark carton on a loading dock in the sun is an oven.

Label the case with the batch code. It costs nothing and it is what makes a recall a phone call.

Shipping to a customer

A tube travels well in a padded envelope, which is most of why this category works online.

In hot months, consider dispatching early in the week so nothing sits in a depot over a weekend, and say so on the order confirmation rather than after a complaint.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for lip care, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation and FDA guidance named on each page, not from a laboratory or a legal practice. Whether a particular formula and a particular label make a cosmetic or a drug is a determination about your product, and this is not that determination.