PPS Plastic Pallets on the way to Amazon US
PPS Midlands recently completed a transaction with high class ceramics supplier Bliss Home, which was a little out of their normal scope of business!
PPS has two locations, at Measham, known as PPS Midlands and PPS East at Grimsby. The company specialises in services connected to returnable transit packaging, this mainly including plastic crates, plastic boxes, plastic pallets or pallet boxes. The company will rent out returnable transit equipment, they will use their own proprietary online asset tracking system to collect used equipment from third parties and return it to one of their sites, both of which house state-of-the-art professional wash units. As much of the PPS customer base is in the food sector, all packaging is washed before being returned to service.
The company refers to this system as “Total Equipment Solutions” which reflects their ability to offer pool management systems to their clients.
As a large part of their customer base is food related, their wash plants have ISO 22000 and BRC accreditation, giving their major and blue chip customers every confidence in their professional standards.
PPS has always been an ambitious business and a couple of years ago they set up within the business a small department selling used, second hand and also new returnable transit packaging. This may again include plastic tote boxes, nestable crates, plastic pallets and plastic pallet boxes. Direct sales of returnable equipment have grown since PPS decided to offer product sales as well as sale of services.
The company was recently approached by Bliss Home, a specialised supplier of high grade and designer ceramics who wished to buy a quantity of plastic pallets for a major export order they had won. Amazon US, the major online seller had placed a substantial order for Bliss Home ceramic products which will be sold on the Amazon US website. The volume of the order won by Bliss Home was such that a quantity of pallets was needed to ship the products to the US. However there are restrictions on sending wooden pallets to the USA, and so the alternative was to select plastic pallets.
But plastic pallets are traditionally several times more expensive than their wooden counterparts, so Bliss Home started to look for a plastic pallet that was cost-effective, but still met the strict US conditions. PPS had a solution – they had a stock of what they term “export pallets”. These are fully functional plastic pallets but designed as a one way or single trip plastic pallet. These export plastic pallets fitted the Bliss Home criteria and they purchased a substantial volume of these plastic pallets from PPS for this important export order.
Joanne Moss, PPS Sales Executive said “Most of our direct sales business comes from a broad range of customers across many industrial sectors. We have sold our returnable plastic packaging products to the likes of the BBC, the Welsh Rugby Union and now a new client servicing Amazon USA”.
04/01/2012
