Shipping
This page answers one question: once your drawings are signed off, what happens between our factory floor and your site, and which of those steps need a decision from you.
Where the clock starts
Production takes 35 to 45 days, counted from signed-off drawings, ex-works, before sea freight. The clock does not start when you place the order. It starts when the shop drawings come back approved, because that is the point at which panels can be cut. Time spent going back and forth on drawings sits outside that number, and it is the part of the schedule you control. If you want to see how those stages run in order, we set them out in the step-by-step ordering process.
Ocean freight is separate and is counted on top.
Transit times we publish, and the ones we do not
To Australia, sea freight runs about 3 to 5 weeks. Adding production, that is roughly 56 to 80 days door to door.
To New Zealand, we work on a delivered basis and count about 45 to 60 days to the door, which puts the whole job at roughly 80 to 105 days from signed-off drawings. The lead time article breaks the same numbers down stage by stage.
For every other destination we confirm the transit with the forwarder against your actual port and volume rather than publishing a figure here. We used to have a table of days by region on this site. We took it down, because those numbers had no source behind them and a number with no source is worse than no number. What is fixed is the production end. The sailing end depends on the port pair, the sailing schedule and whether you are taking a full container or sharing one.
Full container or shared
A whole kitchen, or a kitchen plus wardrobes, usually justifies its own container. Smaller jobs go LCL, sharing space with other cargo, which costs less in freight but adds handling at both ends and makes the arrival date less exact.
As an indication of the freight line in a budget, a 40HQ container from China to Australia has recently been in the range of USD 1,900 to 2,500, and to New Zealand USD 2,500 to 3,000. These are market rates. They move with the season and the route, so treat them as a planning figure and let us confirm the live rate when we quote. The landed cost breakdown shows where freight sits against the other lines in an import budget.
Who does what at the two ends
For New Zealand we deliver to the place you name and carry the freight cost and risk to that point. Import clearance, duty and GST are handled and paid by you as the importer.
For other destinations the split is agreed before we quote, because it changes the number. If you already have a forwarder, we are happy to hand over at their warehouse in China instead, and several customers do exactly that.
Insurance is worth adding. We do not build it into the goods price, and we would rather you decide the cover than have it assumed.
What we need from you to price the freight
Three things, and until all three exist nobody can give you a real freight figure, including us: the delivery address, the value of the goods, and the cubic volume of the packed order. Volume only becomes firm once the drawings are signed off and we know how the units break down into cartons and crates. That is why a freight number early in a conversation is always an estimate.
What arrives
Cabinets ship assembled unless the drawings say otherwise, with doors and drawer fronts fitted and hardware installed. Packing and biosecurity treatment are covered on our packaging page, and what happens on site is covered on our installation page.
If you want to talk through the shipping side of a specific project, write to thomas@moyisihome.com with the destination port and roughly what the job covers.