When it comes to warehouse design, floor space is always a looming concern – but what about the rest of the space?

Once you’ve finally figured out your ideal layout for things like warehouse pallet racks and commercial wire shelving, it can be frustrating to feel like you still don’t have enough space for the things you need to store and organize. This may require a little organization on your part, but there’s always another place to look for storage opportunities – like the walls!

Using Wall Shelves in Your Warehouse

While the vast majority of storage space in the warehouse tends to be large vertical racking, that does leave a lot of surface area generally unused. Wall shelves aren’t the most common solution for most warehousing storage needs, but under the right conditions you can actually use them to solve a number of storage issues.

Commercial wall shelving can help provide storage for items big and small, especially if they’re not accessed as frequently as the goods on the main floor area. Depending on the type of shelving being used, you could use them to store a number of items, including:

• Overflow storage: For the more popular items that seem to run out of stock more quickly than others, commercial adjustable wall shelving can be used to store safety stock or overflow inventory. Keep them mounted on a wall close to the item’s standard location among the racks, and make sure your team knows to pick from the normal area and not the safety storage first.
• Tools and equipment: Things like pallet rack parts, while durable, will need a little adjusting sometimes – a tightened bolt here, a replaced screw there. Wall shelves can be a great way to store the hand tools needed to make these adjustments quickly and without a lot of extra effort, especially if the wall shelves are closer than the tool cabinet.
• Picking supplies: Similarly, the modern warehouse employee finds themselves using a number of different tools like RFID scanners, tablets, and the like to get their job done. While these items should ideally be locked away somewhere safe at night (like behind a warehouse security partition), while they’re in use, wall shelves can be used to create a storage and charging station when the battery runs dry, or when the lunch break rolls around.
• Quick storage for shrink items: Despite our best efforts, things still in the warehouse tend to get broken or damaged through a number of accidents. If you discover broken items on a pallet rack or inside a bin, a nearby wall shelf can become temporary storage for the things that need to be shrunk out of inventory before they can be sent back to the manufacturer.

These are just a few of the ways we’ve seen wall shelves being used in warehouses. Whatever you choose to do with yours, we think you’ll agree that these shelves can be a huge help to your team and your warehouse.