On a retail chair program, freight is not a footnote — it can run close to the factory cost of the chair itself. Buyers spend weeks negotiating a few cents off the unit price and then ship air inside the box. The biggest lever in a container program is how the chair packs, and it is the one most quotes barely mention. Here are the real numbers we plan against.
What a 40HQ actually holds
A 40-foot high-cube container — the workhorse of furniture export — has roughly 2.70 m of interior height and 2.35 m of interior width, and it will carry a maximum payload around 28,620 kg. On paper its volume is about 67 to 68 CBM. Forget that number for planning. You cannot fill a box to its geometric maximum: cartons do not tessellate perfectly, you need to load and brace, and the realistic loadable volume of a 40HQ is closer to 54 to 60 CBM. We quote against the realistic figure, because a plan built on 68 CBM ships fewer chairs than promised and blows the landed cost.
For chairs, the binding limit is almost always volume, not weight. A container of leisure or office chairs hits its CBM ceiling long before it approaches 28 tonnes. That single fact is why packing, not steel weight, is where the money is.
Knock-down packing is the whole game
An assembled office or rocking chair is mostly air — the space under the seat, between the legs, around the back. Ship it assembled and you pay to freight that air. Pack it knock-down (KD) — base, gas lift, seat, back and arms flat in the carton for the customer to assemble — and the same chair can drop from, say, a bulky assembled carton to a fraction of the cube. We have seen programs roughly double the chair count per container by going from assembled to a well-designed KD carton. That is not a rounding error; it can halve the freight per chair.
The trade-off is honest and it belongs to your channel, not to us. KD shifts a few minutes of assembly onto the end customer and needs clear, picture-based instructions and the right fasteners in the bag, or you trade freight savings for support calls and returns. For a flat-pack-friendly retailer or e-commerce program, KD is almost always right. For a contract order where chairs arrive ready to roll into an office, assembled or part-assembled may be worth the cube. We will lay out the CBM and the freight delta for both so you decide with numbers.
Planning a multi-container program
Once a program runs to several containers, the planning shifts from "how many fit" to "how do we keep them coming." With six dedicated rocking-chair lines and five office-chair lines, we schedule a program as a cadence — so many 40HQ per month against a rolling forecast — rather than one heroic shipment. That smooths your warehouse intake and our line loading, and it lets us hold a master carton spec stable across the whole run so your DC scans the same SKU every time. Tell us the annual volume and we plan the rhythm, not just the first box.
How we quote it
When you ask for a quote on our office chairs or rocking chairs, we give you the carton dimensions, the loaded CBM and the chairs-per-40HQ for both assembled and knock-down, not just an FOB unit price. That is the number that decides your landed cost. For programs heading to multiple regions, line the packing up with the compliance path in our certificates note.
Send your target annual quantity and destination ports through the contact form or to mail@ajdk.net, and our OEM programme will come back with a loading plan and a per-container chair count you can actually budget against.