How AoA Packs Airguns – And Why It Matters To You

In a previous report, we looked at how Airguns of Arizona prepares the airguns it sells. Now we’ll re-join that Daystate Red Wolf Safari /Athlon Cronus BTG order we saw being assembled and tested to see how AoA packs airguns.

Packing may not seem like a glamorous or sexy aspect of selling airguns, but it’s vitally important. If you have ordered a beautiful new air rifle, you want it to arrive in perfect condition. No excuses. That’s why this story matters to you.

And there’s something I have to tell you. At HAM we’ve received airguns from just about every company in the business. We know that Airguns of Arizona’s packaging is second to none. Let’s see how AoA packs airguns before they are sent to you.

To see how AoA packs airguns, I joined our customer order and packaging specialist Josh – ever smiling in his work station. Sure, it’s compact – actually you can make that tiny – but he has everything immediately to hand and that facilitates his work immensely.

Custom Packaging For Your Order

The first order of business for Josh is to double-check – again – that the order has been picked correctly. He then cocks and fires the gun into a handy pellet trap. This is just to be sure that the gun really is safe. It’s just been test-fired, after all. (The shot is a blank, there’s no pellet remaining in the gun).

That confirmed, Josh is confronted with the Delta Wolf and mounted scope. That’s significant because it means that the gun will no longer fit into the Daystate factory box.

So what does Josh do? He constructs a custom box so that the gun can be shipped safely with the scope mounted! Again, there’s no charge to the customer for this outstanding level of service…

Note that if the customer requests that the original boxes and packaging for expensive items are sent as well, these will be shipped (empty) as a separate package for high-value orders.

At this point it’s important to mention that packaging supplies are not cheap. In spite of this, AoA does not skimp, Josh uses heavy weight card boxes and expensive “egg crate” foam to pack the orders.

So the Red Wolf is placed in the custom box and pieces of foam are expertly cut to surround and protect the airgun and scope. The 0DB silencer is removed and wrapped separately in bubble wrap.

Everything is packed securely so as to avoid movement during shipment. Heavy duty bubble wrap sheets are also used where necessary. It’s movement that causes the overwhelming amount of shipping damage and this Daystate is going nowhere.

Then the custom box is itself double-boxed!

Finally, Josh wraps high quality “Shurtape” (also known as filament tape) around the ends of the shipping boxes to avoid snagging in the shipper’s automated – and none too delicate – automated package handling machinery.

Given the range of customer order choices, pellets or accessories may be shipped in a second (or third) package. AoA has dedicated foam wrapping for tins of pellets.

Even more impressively, it also has heavy duty custom card and foam boxes at hand specifically to protect HPA tanks during shipping. (Josh double-checks all HPA tanks to ensure they’re empty before packing them, as you would expect by now).

It’s All Insurance For You

Finally, Josh weighs the parcels, prints shipping labels and our Red Wolf customer order is now ready to join the daily UPS collection. Furthermore, every UPS package is fully insured against loss or damage. That’s done automatically and it’s another costly step AoA takes to ensure that you will be happy – even if things go somehow awry when the “brown company” transports your order.

It was important to me to see that Josh used none of the currently-popular brown packaging paper when packing this order.

Sure brown paper is recyclable and cheap but scrunched-up brown paper is very poor at protecting the contents of shipping packages as it allows items to move during transit and handling. That’s NOT how AoA packs airguns!

Airguns or not, we’ve all received badly-packed packages in our time. The disappointment caused by by receiving a parcel with shipping damage can be brutal.

And then what do you do? Ship it back and risk more damage? At the very least, you have frustration, time and effort in contacting the vendor and proving the problem. And what if they didn’t insure your package? We’ve all been there…

Nowadays, almost all of us buy our airguns remotely from a vendor many miles away. It’s clear that shipping companies are not over careful with the packages they convey. They expect them to be properly packed. If not, you – the customer – has a problem.

That’s why it matters very much how your purchases are packaged. It’s an area where Airguns of Arizona excels!

PS. At Extreme Benchrest 2021, Josh competed in a spontaneous fun challenge. He and the shipping specialist from Utah Airguns both had to assemble a set number of USPS Priority Mail shipping boxes, working against the clock. Josh won!!!