Written by P. Whitfield, Yard Lead
Sometime in 2023 we started getting an unusual class of visitor at the yard: young industrial designers with sketchbooks, asking if they could buy a few sheets of doublewall corrugated for a prototype. They had tried the big paper distributors and been quoted four-week lead times and minimum orders of $400. We had a stack of retired gaylords waiting to be cut down and a yard full of off-cuts. The match was obvious.
What they are building.
A few examples from the last year: a modular folding stool that ships flat in a 12x12 envelope, a series of acoustic wall panels that absorb sound in open offices, a children’s play kitchen that costs $40 to make, a set of trade-show display modules that snap together with paper hinges, and — the strangest one — a full-scale corrugated guitar that actually played for about 30 minutes before it gave up.
How we sell to them.
We charge by the square foot. A retired triplewall gaylord cut into 4x4 squares runs about $0.60 per square foot. A stack of unused doublewall offcuts runs $0.30 per square foot. We do not require minimum orders for design work, and we let designers come paw through the bin themselves. Most leave with twenty to fifty square feet and a vague promise to send us photos when the project is done.
Why we love this.
Design work is the upstream end of the corrugated industry. The decisions designers make in their prototypes today become the box specs ten years from now. Every time a designer decides to use reclaimed corrugated for a project, that’s one more person out in the world who knows reuse-first packaging is possible.