I picked up quite a bit of experience in this when we shipped over that pallet of lighting stuff from Rob to Rob. We used an agent called FreightQuote who helped us with the door to door shipment from Rob's Office in New York all the way to Cambridge.

If you are looking for tips, I would say take a personal interest in every step of the shipment yourself if time is o the essence, I forget the exact timescales we ran to I think it was something like 4-6 weeks and I am pretty sure it would have been much longer than that if I hadn't chased it though at each stage, ensuring the clearance paperwork was sorted before it landed in the UK saved weeks I think.

We did look at Air Shipping at one point but I think it was 10x more expensive than sea shipping on a pallet in a container.

Freight Quote were the only ones who took me seriously and gave me a realistic quote, I can dig the details out if you need them but give them a ring they are very helpful indeed.

Cheers

Cris.