Yes over the years our operation has grown from basment to warehouses. Due to the growth, we are in multiple warehouses (signed leases) so as soon as these leases are over, we are building our very own warehouse to consolidate the entire business under 1 roof. It will be another year or so for that to happen.
First off we have really good sources for fish. That makes our lives half way easy. We have not seen ich on our incoming fish in almost 3 years and because we do copper/uv/ozone etc and other meds, we guarantee our fish not to have the major 4 (ich/velvet/brook/uronema) and internal worms/flukes. Pretty much covering most of the nasty's that people dont want in their tanks.
We are also very open and forward with our species if we dont have a good source.
We recently started getting chromis from Kenya and Lyretail anthios and dispar from Red Sea. Those we can guarentee not to have any uronema. rest of the anthias are 50/50. as internal uronema is extremely hard to detect.
For shipping, we use standard styrofoam coolers and carboard outside, Our bags are specially made for us. They are 4 mil thick bags, (industry standard is 2 mil). Our bags are heat sealed from all 4 sides, No rubberband, or clips to fail. One can stand on our seal bag and it will not burst. (youtube has some videos)
Regarding keeping temp control, We have done many experiments and thus learned how many heat pack and how many cold packs are needed to ship in certain temps.
We also dont ship if temps are too high or too low.
Following is a chart of our experiment.
If amient is 90F with NO cold pack in the box,(pink line) temp remains 75F from 7pm (ups drop off) to 10am delivery
with 1 cold pack it starts at 75F dips down to 70F and by time of delivery its about 72F
With 2 cold packs that gets a little too cold as it dips down to 67F. But we do use 2 sometimes if temps are higher than 100F.