Manufacturing a new productManufacturing a new product

Whether you ship your wines from place to place using conventional package delivery services or your own bespoke transport vehicles, it's a fair bet that your bottles won't stay in one piece for long without the correct packaging to protect them on their journeys. Traditionally, this meant packing your wine bottles tightly into timber crates, and while this conventional approach still has a lot of merits, more and more wine producers and dealers are turning to a more modern form of packaging—inflatable packaging.

Sold under a variety of brand names, inflatable wine bottle packages are essentially large, bottle-shaped plastic sacks with inflatable walls. They may not look like much, but they have a number of advantages over more conventional wine packaging options made from timber, polystyrene and compressed cardboard. Here are just some of them:

Exceptional impact protection

Inflatable wine packaging excels when it comes to protecting your wine bottles from heavy impacts, providing far more padding and protection than timber or cardboard boxes and even outperforming thick, contoured polystyrene bottle boxes. Because the air contained within your inflatable packaging is compressed under heavy impacts and loads, the shock of an impact is not transmitted to the bottle itself, making these packages particularly useful for protecting bottles from drops and falls.

Reusable

As soon as your wine reaches its destination safely, your inflatable wine packages can be deflated, repacked and sent back to your premises ready to be reused, time and time again. This makes them a remarkably environmentally friendly option despite being made from plastics, and using them can dramatically cut your packaging overheads if you previously used packaging less suitable for reuse, such as polystyrene (which tends to flake and lose strength) or cardboard (which is essentially ruined if allowed to come into contact with moisture).

Cost effective

Although these packages are made with modern materials and processes, they can actually be considerably cheaper to buy than timber boxes, especially when purchased in bulk orders. Considering how easily they can be reused, this makes them an extremely economical option.

Customisable

Inflatable wine packages can be customised just like any other form of wine packaging, and they can be made to prominently feature the name of your winery or distributor. This can help increase brand awareness of your wines, which is a particularly useful quality for small-scale producers.

Can be supplemented with traditional crates

There are some areas in which inflatable wine bottle packages aren't the best option—for example, their irregularly-shaped cushions mean they cannot be easily stacked when shipping large orders. In these cases, the inflatable packages can easily be supplemented with more conventional timber or polystyrene crates, and they will fit easily into most standard-sized wine boxes. Ordering both inflatable packages and conventional boxes from the same wine packaging supplier can be a great way to save money while preparing for all eventualities.