I’m always in awe of strange little niches in the product marketing world. Every so often I’ll be in a junk store or in a grocery store or in a hardware store and I’ll find some sort of interesting item or packaging. Then, looking further, I’ll find there are many competitors with similarly interesting packaging. Then I begin to realize that this little niche has been breeding amazing stuff for a long time and nobody seems to really notice (well, outside of aficionados).
Take as an example typewriter ribbons. Back in them days of yore, when you used to actually send a document created on a typewriter, you needed to load the paper and typewriter ribbons (ink-soaked fabric ribbons that spooled into the machine and fed through as you typed, creating an ink source). The manufacture of typewriter ribbons was one of those strange little industries that allowed just about anybody to join and become competitive. Since all ribbons were virtually the same, the only way one could compete was through cool packaging.
The result was a huge number of small businesses producing these marvelous little round metal canisters completely covered with amazing graphic design. I see them all over antique stores and malls. Really cool-looking stuff. And collected by weirdos like me, just like baseball cards—I want to have the whole set.
Other areas I found a similar American marketing ingenuity (and hucksterism) are motor oil, condoms, nylon stockings, and fruit jars. I think if you look far and deep enough you could find literally thousands of products that competed on the level of cool package design, even though the products were virtually identical inside. It’s the American way, ya know.
Which brings me to this little image. There really was something about the office products industry that attracted this approach to marketing and design. I guess it’s because a pencil is a pencil and a paper clip is a paper clip. Once you got that down, how do you get people to pay attention to your eraser or staple over anybody else’s staple or eraser?
Carbon paper is another classic example. It was used to type out extra copies of a document. You floated the carbon paper between the sheet of paper you were actually typing on and extra sheet or two behind the top sheet. I mean, it’s all made of the same stuff: carbon coating on one side, product ID on the other. All of the competition used the same stuff and sold it in the same uniform flat boxes. What do you do?
You make cool packaging! Way cool packaging. You exploit current events, you appeal to the “fashion sense” of the buyer. I’ve often considered starting a collection of the coolest carbon paper boxes I can find. In this case, Carter’s carbon paper. It’s all about outer space. Sputnik. Satellites. The wonder of the great beyond. To sell carbon paper. Beautiful, eh?
