Bespoke and custom pallets in Portsmouth
Standard pallets cover most jobs, and where they do we will tell you to use one. This page is for everything else: the load that overhangs, the item too heavy for its footprint, and the piece of equipment that has to arrive undamaged and will not sit on anything off the shelf.
When a standard pallet stops working
There are four situations where customers usually end up asking for something built to suit. The load overhangs the deck, so it gets caught, crushed at the edges or refused by a carrier. The item is dense and concentrated, so it pushes through a deck designed for spread weight. The pallet has to fit a specific space — a container, a lift, a racking bay, a vehicle floor — and the standard size wastes it. Or the item is tall or unstable and needs something to fix it to.
If you recognise your problem in that list, describe the item rather than the pallet when you ring. The size of pallet you think you need is often not the size the job actually wants.
What to measure before you call
Length, width and height of the item. Its weight. Where that weight sits — evenly across the base, on feet, on a frame, on two rails. Whether anything overhangs, and by how much. If the pallet has to fit inside something, the internal dimensions of that space, not the outside.
Then the handling side: how it will be lifted, whether a forklift needs entry from all four sides, whether it will be stacked, and whether it is being moved once or repeatedly.
The honest answer is sometimes a standard pallet
A custom build costs more than something off the stack, and it is not always worth it. For a single movement, adapting a standard pallet, doubling up a deck or changing how the item sits often solves the problem for far less.
Where it does earn its money is on repeat work. If the same awkward item moves every week, a pallet built to hold it properly saves handling time, reduces damage and stops the argument at the receiving end about whether the load was presented safely.
Plastic, timber and export
Most bespoke work is timber, because it can be built to a size. Where hygiene, washdown or a long service life matters, it is worth asking whether a standard plastic pallet plus a change in how you load is a better answer than a custom timber one.
If a bespoke pallet is going overseas, timber packaging has marking requirements that depend on the destination and must be settled before anything is built. Say so at the outset — exportpallets.co.uk in our group covers that ground properly.