The Best Way to Ship Soft Furniture

Packing soft furniture so you can safely ship it might seem like a daunting task. You’re wary of cushions being torn. Hard furniture pieces like tables, chairs, and desks pose their own difficulties because you don’t want them to get scratched and you have to pad legs. Yet soft furniture can be heavy like couches and much more irregularly shaped. How do you pack it so you can safely ship soft furniture?

By Container: One of the safest bets is to ship soft furniture in a container along with other things you’re shipping. This allows you or professional movers to safely stow everything with protection and padding. It’s also a cost-effective way of shipping many pieces of furniture at a time. It’s much more hassle to ship pieces separately than it is to load them together, pad them in a container, and ship them this way.

That’s assuming you’re shipping soft furniture as part of a larger load, though. What if you’re only shipping a single piece? This changes things.

By Crate: A great way to ship soft furniture is in a crate. A crate can provide hard protection that will keep soft furniture from being punctured or torn. Something like a couch or soft chair will have further padding inside the crate to make it stable and stop it from shifting. This is one of the best approaches for any kind of irregularly shaped object, be it large or small. A crate can furthermore be attached to skids so it’s easier for a forklift to load and unload.

By Pallet: You can also secure a sofa or other soft furniture directly onto a pallet. You can take advantage of couch covers or packing blankets to make the couch safer, but we advise looking into a third method as well. Microfoam can be wrapped around the sofa and taped to itself. This can be covered with pads, which can then be shrinkwrapped to secure all the padding tightly to the sofa. Never directly shrinkwrap a sofa. It must have padding underneath, or the shrinkwrap will cause condensation that can ruin the sofa.

These are three different approaches that will vary in cost. We highly recommend packing soft furniture in containers when shipping multiple pieces, or in crates when you ship soft furniture singly. These afford the best protection. Every method requires secure padding, the approach will just vary.