Late 2024 a buyer told me a chunk of his sets arrived with crushed sleeves and a couple of cracked balls. The paddles were fine, but the retail box is what the shopper sees, so a crushed box basically means it can't go on the shelf.
I didn't want to just say sorry and reprint, so we did our own rough test. Nothing scientific. We took a packed master carton, put it on a table about a meter up, and dropped it on each corner and each face. Then opened it up and looked at what got hurt.
The first surprise was the ball. Our old packs had the ball sitting loose next to the paddle head, and on a corner drop it would slam into the paddle and either crack or dent. The paddle was fine but the ball took the hit.
The second thing was the sleeve. The printed cardboard sleeve looked nice but it carried zero structure, so when the master carton flexed, the sleeves on the edge of the carton got the crease. The middle ones were fine.
So we changed two things. We added a thin molded pulp tray that holds the ball in its own little pocket away from the paddle head. And we stopped packing sleeves right against the carton wall, we put a layer of the net bags as a buffer on the outside rows instead.
We dropped it again, same way, for about a week off and on whenever someone walked past the test table. Crush damage went way down. Not zero, a really bad throw will still beat anything, but the normal warehouse bumps stopped wrecking the retail look.
One thing I'll admit, the pulp tray added a tiny bit of cost per set. Maybe a couple cents. The buyer didn't care once I showed him the before and after photos. Cheaper than reprinting and re-shiping.
Now I keep a beat-up test carton in the corner. Visitors always ask why it looks like someone kicked it down stairs.
