Published with the support of Package Design Magazine, this is a comprehensive guide to thinking outside the box to create practical, cost-effective, and eco-responsible packaging. With a broad ...
Now be honest, you’ve done this a million times: You bought the cheapest thing or opted for the cheapest “fix,” and over time ended up spending more money overall than if you had just broken down and forked over the bucks for the right solution in the first place. For companies, this “lesson” can run in the millions of dollars. For me, one lesson was a simple garlic press.
You know what they are, you probably own one. They are like a small handheld extrusion mold, pressing out the pulp from a single clove of garlic instead of hot plastic. Garlic presses come in prices ranging from $3 to $30 and are made from the cheapest molded mystery metal to beautifully formed stainless steel.
My first garlic press was mystery metal (I’m guessing aluminum) cost about $5 and snapped at the handle after only a few months. (What can I say, we like garlic at my house.) My second garlic press was a “step-up,” with a lovely plastic coated handle for $12. Though the overall unit was more robust looking, the brass hinge snapped after about a year, and the way the thing was constructed, you could not put in a new pin without drilling out the old pin and weakening the hinge area more, so into the garbage it went too.
My third garlic press lasted longer than the first two (if “lasting” means “didn’t break”) only because the cleaning mechanism was so awful I stopped using it after a few months. This one cost about $15, but I tossed it out rather than inflict it on some hapless schmo as a garage sale “treasure.” This brings me to my last garlic press. The design is such that it can be totally disassembled for cleaning. It’s durable (I’ve had it for over 10 years now), comfortable, and a joy to use, and it cost about $30.
Well, actually, it cost $62 (adding them all up). This particular $30 garlic press was on the market the whole time I was groping around and cutting corners, but I kept asking myself: “Why do I want to spend $30 on a garlic press?” Had I considered HOW I used the tool to meet the need, rather than just the cost to address the function, I could have bought once—and bought right—the first time.
Sometimes what it takes to move ahead in real terms is to be willing to embrace system and process. Rather than just go for surface flash or problem “fixing,” we should be willing to admit that maybe the “newest thing” or the “cheapest thing” (overall) has been sitting in front of us the whole time.
Celery Design developed packaging for their client, Bon Ami, with an eye toward super-green solutions. They found during the process though that many of the things that were popping to the top had been used for the product back in the 1800s. Ultimately deciding not to change the structure for the cleanser product, they drew on its heritage to bring out the product’s simple pragmatism. In an article (www.feltandwire.com/?p=7639) about the branding and packaging project for Bon Ami, Brian Dougherty of Celery notes: “Spiral winding is cheap, efficient, easy to recycle, and uses a high percentage of post-consumer fiber...One of our jobs as designers is to uncover these heirloom solutions and teach people to cherish them again."
The Sustainability Update is coordinated by Wendy Jedlicka, CPP – Jedlicka Design Ltd. (www.jedlicka.com), o2 International Network for Sustainable Design (www.o2.org and www.o2umw.org), and Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s ground breaking Sustainable Design Certificate Program (www.mcad.edu/sustainable).
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