Light Duty Warehouse Racks

Light duty racks — light weight shelving — are the hand-loaded end of warehouse storage: shelving sized for small cartons, folded garments, accessories and pick-face stock that a person, not a forklift, puts away and retrieves. In a clothing operation this is the shelving of stockrooms, returns benches, sample rooms and e-commerce picking areas, where the goods are light, the variety is high and every item needs to be reachable by hand.

What Light Duty Shelving Is For

Light duty systems trade load capacity for flexibility and access. Shelves adjust on close increments so the vertical space follows the goods — low shelves for folded knitwear and accessories, taller openings for shoe boxes and hat boxes — and bays can be reconfigured as the stock mix changes with the season. Because everything is loaded by hand, shelf heights stay within comfortable reach, aisles can be far narrower than forklift aisles, and the same run can hold picking stock, packaging materials and the small equipment a packing bench consumes.

The manufacturers in this section build light shelving as part of a wider storage range. BITO, listed below, produces shelving and racking for loads from 50 kg per shelf upward and pairs the shelving with the bin and container systems made at its Lauterecken plant — the combination of light shelves and labelled picking bins is the standard furniture of an apparel order-picking face.

Planning a Light Duty Area

Start from the pick, not the shelf. The fastest-moving small goods belong at waist height where they can be picked without bending or stretching; slow movers go high or low; and reserve cartons of the same lines belong nearby so the face can be replenished without a trip across the building. Light duty shelving also carries the long tail of an apparel range — the sizes and colours that sell one at a time — far more economically than pallet positions, which is why growing online operations typically expand their light shelving first.

Keep the limits in view: light shelving is for hand loads, and the commonest misuse is creeping weight — cartons of denim or footwear quietly stacked onto shelves rated for folded garments. If a load needs two people or a trolley to lift it safely, it belongs on medium duty racking, not on a light shelf.

Small-part order is the other half of a light duty area. Labelled bins and containers on the shelves — the bin and container systems that the manufacturer listed here produces alongside its shelving — keep small apparel items such as buttons, trims, spare parts and accessories findable, and shelf dividers stop folded stock migrating between facings. Run a replenishment rule with the shelving: when a pick face sells down, refill it from its reserve carton the same day, so the light shelves never dwindle into single remaining items that nobody can sell and nobody quite throws away.

Racking Companies

Bito Storage Systems (United Kingdom) — an internationally operating manufacturer of storage and order picking systems, whose range starts with light weight shelving for small, light goods. At its plant in Lauterecken it also manufactures storage, transport and order picking containers — bin and container systems with a broad spectrum of applications in any industry.

Nanjing Nuobei Rack Equipment Manufacturing Factory — among the earliest producers specializing in logistics systems, with a complete product line spanning light shelving through full warehouse racking. The factory offers design projects for warehouse layouts, manufactures the racks it designs, and provides a professional after-sale service team for installation and related work.