RapCo Raps have won awards from the general public and from the moving industry. Way back in 2008 it won the People’s choice award on the popular ABC TV show “The New Inventors” and shortly after that it won the “Best New Product” awarded by the Furniture Industry Magazine.
“I was moving house with the help of my ex-husband and my brother 6’7” 120kg. Both pretty fit although my ex has let himself go a bit. Everything was going well (as well as it could when you’re moving house) when we got to the 3 seater sofa. It had to go upstairs. So after more than half an hour of sweating and swearing (and a few marks and scrapes on the new walls), the boys got it up the stairs and to the door. There it got stuck and they both swore that it will never get through the doorway. ‘It’s impossible’ they said.”
“So I said leave it in the garage and I’ll work out what to do. The next day I rang Darren a friend of mine who delivers sofas for a living and he said it shouldn’t be a problem and he’ll call around after work to sort it. I said I wasn’t sure if I could organise one of the boys and he said we’ll be right just him and me. I had my doubts.”
“He arrived, wrapped it in a Rap specially designed for sofas, I got on one end, he got on the other and within 5 minutes we’d got it up the stairs, through the doorway and into the room.”
“I still can’t believe how we did it! I guess it goes to show if you know what you’re doing and you’ve got the right tools it makes any job easy.”
For more than 10 years RapCo’s Raps have been used and re-used by hundreds of customers thousands of times. It all adds up to a lot of plastic bags that were never needed, never bought, never used and therefore never made. We calculate that the use of Raps has meant that thousands of tons of plastic were never produced!
That’s good for everyone (except plastic manufacturers).
Australian multi-award winning company RapCo is partnering with Harvey Norman, Australia’s biggest furniture retailer to reduce the use of massive plastic bags in the Furniture & Bedding industry.
Plastic bags used to wrap sofas and mattresses can be one thousand times heavier and have over 300 times* the surface area of the average shopping bag. Harvey Norman uses hundreds of thousands of these bags every year to deliver floorstock and do warehouse transfers and now RapCo is providing a better way.
“It’s a win, win, win situation” said Andrew Hurst, the CEO of RapCo and the inventor of the Sofa and Mattress Raps (their name for the bags).
“The retailer wins as it costs less, the customer wins as it protects their furniture and the environment wins. Actually the environment wins in a couple of ways, first of all there is so much less waste as the Raps can be used hundreds of times, second there is the energy saved, each bag uses the equivalent of driving a car 100kms**. Also there is all the oil, (plastic is derived from petroleum) that doesn’t need to be used. I suppose the only loser is the manufacture of the plastic bags”
RapCo was invited to the Harvey Norman trade show to demonstrate their Raps to all the Harvey Norman Furniture and Bedding proprietors from around Australia when they gather in Sydney this Wednesday & Thursday at the Showground in Homebush.
Stewart Burke Operations Manager for Harvey Norman organised a special stand at the trade show for RapCo. Katie Page, CEO of Harvey Norman was one of the first companies to sign up to the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO) more than 15 years ago. APCO is a co-regulatory, not-for-profit organisation that partners with government and industry to reduce the harmful impact of packaging on the Australian environment.
*the average plastic shopping bag weighs 5 gms and the large plastic bags for King Mattresses and large sofas can weigh up to 5 kgs. The surface area of a large sofa bag is 10.8m2 and it is only 0.0375m2 for a shopping bag.
** Around 0.48 megajoules (MJ) of energy is consumed to make one shopping bag including the energy content of the bag (the embodied energy). Another way of considering this is that the energy consumed by driving a car one kilometre is the equivalent of manufacturing 8.7 plastic bags (Nolan-ITU 2002). As a Furniture bag can weigh 1000 times a shopping bag you can drive a car 1000/8.7 = 114km using the energy of one furniture.
bag.https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/1301.0Feature%20Article212004
Fridge and Washer Raps – Used on it’s own or in harmony with a trolley a Fridge Rap makes moving fridges easy.
The handles make it easier to manoeuvre around corners and tight corridors.
The padding on the base reduces the chance of damage to timber floors.
And they only take a minute to put on!
There’s a Washer Rap coming soon too.
Brian a retailer in Chattanooga, USA, first bought Raps in 2014. They’ve been selling a lot of large sofas lately so he recently bought the extra-large Rap 300 size.
Jordan, a furniture mover in Newcastle, Australia has had the same Sofa and Mattress Raps for almost 10 years.
“I’m due to replace them soon and they’ve been such good value. We don’t buy/need plastic anymore.”
Progressive Furniture movers and retailers around the world are converting from plastic to Raps for their businesses.