As a designer AND a consumer (especially one with small children), I am always intrigued by package design. What a fascinating job that must be—sketching, wrapping, folding, opening, testing on a shelf, placing merchandise inside, wow, it makes my head spin. I love walking through a store, scanning the shelves for interesting packaging concepts, colors, shapes, sizes and textures. Then I bring that crap home and have to open it. Yikes. Recently, I opened a toy that was already assembled and even had the stickers strategically placed on the toy (thank goodness for that), but getting it out of the 32 twist-ties and 27 rubber bands took me the better part, or actually the worse part, of an afternoon.
Maybe design has come too far for packaging efficiency. In 2006 Consumer Reports coined the phrase "wrap rage" to describe what it feels like when opening frustrating and consumer-unfriendly packaging. Things have improved, if at a snail's pace, since 2006 and a few good options have made their way into the marketplace. This 2007 Consumer Reports article touts some of the useful newcomers, such as the perforated clamshell (sorry, it is still a plastic breadknife to me and my sliced-up hands), single-dosage medications and resealable food bags.
As all good things do, fancy-schmancy, wasteful, inefficient packaging must come to an end (if for nothing else than our sanity as parents so we don't slit our wrists with the open clamshell). Amazon.com's CEO announced their "multi-year initiative," yes, that's correct, an initiative, called "frustration-free packaging." (Click here to read the CEO's letter.) In fact, one of their children's toy sets arrives, sans colorful scenery, with all the parts of the set loose (no blister wrap) inside a recyclable, uncoated, unprinted cardboard box. I guess packaging designers will need to start designing colorful, green-friendly labels for those brown boxes and some beautifully detailed (not in Chinese) assembly instruction sheets that can accompany the products.
Hallelujah!
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