A COMPLETE Anomaly

I have discovered an interesting anomaly when shipping HISSandaROAR COMPLETE!

Whenever someone upgrades to HISSandaROAR COMPLETE HD, I ship a 1TB hard drive using DHL… and I always include a gift, a photobook of NZ landscapes by Andris Apse. But last time I shipped, the staff at DHL mentioned that it would cost less to ship using one of their much larger boxes. I thought that seems odd, so yesterday when I shipped an HD for a Game Studio in Korea I asked, and they confirmed. As long as the box weighs less than 10kg (!) it will cost less to ship than my little package of the HD & book.

I mentioned this on Twitter, and a few comments later (Thanks Patrick) was wiser:
– Box that big is harder to lose, so it generates less of an insurance levy
– Boxes are easier to handle with robots

I measured their box – it is 33cm x 33cm x 33cm (13″x13″x13″) and I imagine air freight is charged by the cubic metre, so that box size would mean a 3 x 3 x 3 cube of boxes would perfectly fill one cubic metre of space.
Now I’m not going to fill a large box with bubble wrap (or even worse, those polystyrene beads) because that would be like exporting plastic pollution. But I tried using two beach towells as packing and that amount of bulk could work….

So in future, I will offer to become a personal shopper for new COMPLETE owners.
If there is something uniquely NZ that you would like, I can fill up your box with whatever you like – WETA collectibles, Grandalf hats, merino beanies, books, toys… anything within reason.
But not food or alcohol. I included some chocolate with one shipment a while ago, and it required a whole other set of declarations etc.. as it did effectively involve exporting food.

I am working with a Canadian studio at the moment to pursue this approach, so we can consider it a test case, and if it all proceeds without a hitch then I will offer this service to anyone ordering COMPLETE. Obviously, I am not offering to pay for expensive replica props from LOTR, but if that is what you’d like and it will fit in the box then I am happy to do any purchasing on your behalf and bill accordingly.

It isn’t often in life that you get more, by paying less!