What happens when you drop a 25 kg parcel repeatedly?
Remember that I sent the test package last week.
Apparently I picked the one DHL shop in the area that is only open occasionally, according to a neighbour. I went there to check yesterday, that is when the neighbour told me and I took the photo. It had been sitting there since Friday, and nobody knew when they would be open again.
The shipping itself, once it finally started, went without any problems. That is the part that counts.
The drop tests
Then we dropped it. Repeatedly, from various heights.
From the greater heights there was some damage to the product. It is honestly a bit hard to judge how meaningful that is, because we dropped the same package over and over again, which no real parcel would ever go through.
Still, a few weak spots showed up, and I have fed those back to the packaging manufacturer.
What a drop test actually finds
The useful thing about dropping something repeatedly is not the packaging. It is what the packaging fails to protect.
While inspecting the damage after one of the higher drops, I noticed that a screw on the crossbars had loosened. The manufacturer in China had explicitly confirmed to me that the threadlocker was applied at the right position. It turns out that was not the case. Only part of the threadlocker actually engages with the thread, which is most likely why the screw came loose.
We will need to rework these ourselves. Annoying, but manageable. And another reminder of why doing final assembly in house matters.
That screw would never have been found by anyone walking on the machine. It took throwing it down a stairwell.
The weight
The first packaging prototype weighed about 6 kg. With the Office Walker at around 25 kg that put us right at the DHL limit within Germany and over it internationally in some cases.
The second prototype weighs 3.8 kg and still looks solid.
It is made entirely of paper and cardboard, which is the point, and also the reason it is heavier than styrofoam would be. Removing 2.2 kg without losing protection took a round of iteration with the manufacturer.
What I would look for when buying anything this heavy
Two questions. Does it ship as a standard parcel, or on a pallet? A pallet means a delivery window, a signature, and often no way to get it up a staircase.
And has the packaging been drop tested, or is it simply the box the factory had?
You cannot tell from a product page. But you can ask.
Update, 21 August 2026: packaging ordered
Together with my Kickstarter mentor Ziga, I've decided the best move is to order the packaging now and see how it performs in real-world shipping, while continuing to iterate on improvements in parallel. That way the packaging shouldn't cause any further delays.
I've placed an order for 200 packaging units. The manufacturer sounded confident about the timing. The cutting itself apparently only takes them about two days; it sounded like it's mainly the raw material procurement that determines the schedule.
Shipping and returns · Plastic free packaging · The Office Walker