There is no better proof that we are living in a golden age of design than the fact that a simple cardboard box can be an object d’art. Over the past 18 months “Subscription Ecommerce” has become a popular segment of the online shopping market and brought forth a renaissance in the craft of corrugation. For those unfamiliar with the term, subscription ecommerce is basically a “fruit-of-the-month club” where you get cosmetics, shoes, or other goods mailed to you every month instead of grapefruit. The model has exploded based on some early success like BirchBox and StyleMint and is spreading into a variety of other product categories.

Luxury subscriptions bring a bit of random fun into the life of the customer and provide a steady revenue stream for the merchant, but also create a new set of challenges like creating a brand image with few touch points. With these services the brand is paramount. As a customer you are paying people to choose products for you, sight unseen. With no physical store to set the mood, retailers can only rely on their websites and shipper boxes to build the brand. Packaging is now a major part of the “value add” and is the primary way to assure customers that they have made a smart decision trusting the taste/style of a given marchant. Fortunately for customers, this has made getting a package in the mail even more fun.

Because of their market dominance and reputation for low prices, Amazon hasn’t really done much to dress up their up their boxes in over 10 years. They have a dominant position in the industry and a reputation for operations and delivery so a simple box fits their brand well.

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Alternatively, Zappos was one of the first major ecommerce merchants to set their boxes apart with a distinct color and brand identity. When you see their distinctive box on your stoop, you know exactly what’s waiting for you. This fits with Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh’s desire to build a brand around customer service and their white box has become a symbol that represents this goal.

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BirchBox

BirchBox is the biggest success so far in the subscription ecommerce market and they  have taken a cue from Zappos by staking out a brand position with the color of their shipper box. However, corrugated cardboard gets damaged and doesn’t create a sense of an upscale cosmetics brand so BirchBox also created a more refined, foil stamped inner box. This adds cost, but is necessary to make the experience feel worthwhile. They have also customized the box for partners like Cynthia Rowley in the past.

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Bluum

Bluum, a subscription service for new moms, follows BirchBox’s style with a differentiated outer/inner package. Bluum also invests in a nice baby blue wrapping paper to help make the “out-of’the-box” experience as pleasurable as possible. Just as Godiva and Apple spend money to have their mall stores reflect their brands, ecommerce companies especially subscription based ones, will need to invest in presentation.

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LoveWithFood

LoveWithFood (subscription food samples) doesn’t do much with their design, but the bold red color helps it stand out from the rest, unless you compare it to Bluum. Because there has been so little innovation in mail order packaging design, there is an opportunity for startups to stake out a color identity for their packaging the Tiffany has with its distinct blue green boxes.

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BabbaCo

This will create very real trademark issues. While Bluum and LoveWithFood are in different product categories, BabbaCo a service that mails new craft kits for kids out every month has staked out a bold green color position…

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KiwiCrate

…Unfortunately, so did their direct competitor KiwiCrate. Kiwi Crate and BabbaCo have essentially the same offering, monthly crafts for kids, but also share a color scheme that is confusingly similar. Their target user group of children under 6 years of age would be unlikely to recognize a difference between the “green boxes”. There is a bit of a land grab for colors in these markets and this highlights the limited real estate on the color wheel.

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Citrus Lane

Clever designers can use the nature of their materials to the benefit of the brand. Citrus Lane sends parents ecologically friendly baby toys and supplies.  Instead of a full color box they opted instead for a bright yellow stripe on an otherwise unadorned, natural paper fiber box. This design choice reflects the brand promise that you are getting natural products.

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Foodzie

Monthly gourmet food vendor Foodzie does a nice job reflecting their organic/small producer ethos with a package designed around imperfections from grungy type, crude printing, and unadorned cardboard. Once the box is opened though the presentation takes on a much more polished feel. Each mailer comes with a booklet that explains the origins of the food samples.

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Lollihop

Lollihop takes a similar approach to Foodzie, by providing background about the gourmet food samples they ship, but also add in thematic extras, like a package around Christmas that had little silver bells attached to the lid.

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StyleMint

Sometimes the best package isn’t a box. Because StyleMint is focused on shipping Tshirts they can eschew the box and instead wrap the small, light garments in brown paper packaging (tied up with string) saving on shipping while lending a cool, artisinal vibe to the product.
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Alula Editions

Alula Editions mails fiber arts on a monthly basis and packages them in exquisite envelopes that look almost as nice as the artwork inside. Each package is nicely finished with a ribbon and clearly communicates a brand image that exists outside of the individual contents.

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Quarterly

Quarterly is a subscription service where you receive “Wonderful Things” from interesting people. The interesting people are largely designers and hence the package is nicely minimal on the outside to reveal a bold and striking wrapping paper on the inside. The contents vary month to month, but they always seem cool.

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Shoe Dazzle

ShoeDazzle has a natural box style to use, but have created over the top feminine pink/flower graphics to tightly target a specific type of shopper. Their brand feels as real as any retailer.

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Stylist Pick

Stylist Pick ships cool clothing items every month and they emphasize it with a sleek, glossy, black shoe box. The items inside all come from different producers, but have been blessed with coolness by this slick package.

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Trunk Club

Trunk Club sends men several articles of clothing each month, which they can try them on, send back what they dislike, and pay for the rest. This design artfully takes advantage of the brown paper texture and incorporates the handle in a cute way that makes it feel just a little more like a trunk than a cardboard box. Even the random postage stickers and hand written notes added in transit help build the brand value for Trunk Club. The handle puts the design over the top.

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Virginia Postrel wrote a great book called the Substance of Style arguing how changes in technology and culture were increasing the aesthetic sensitivity of the population. She pointed out that an average consumer, shopping at Target, could choose between no fewer than six designer toilet brushes. She wrote that book back in 2003, but almost 10 years later, trends in technology, commerce, and culture only seem to be accelerating this phenomena. If the lowly cardboard shipper box can become an artwork, is there anything that can’t given the right market forces?

CutLaserCut is a service bureau that offers laser cutting for creative professionals. They’ve done work for Google and Braun, but also reserve time for experimentation. Like any good alpha geeks they wanted to see how far they could push their tools and decided to use their industrial laser cutter to cook a pancake. While it might seem like a frivolous use of such a powerful tool it is important to remember how early we are in the development of home manufacturing. It is hard to make a direct comparison between desktop computing and bench top manufacturing, but imagine if we stopped imagining new uses for computers in 1977.

Also, consider that laser cut pancakes could be bigger than 3D printing. Before you dismiss me as crazy a company called Provocraft turned industrial CNC vinyl cutters into a consumer tech franchise called Cricut that generates ~$250MM a year in revenue. That is ~$100MM more annual revenue than Stratasys or 3D Systems (the two largest 3D printer manufacturers) generate in a year. Provocraft is a quiet company in Utah, that never gets written about in the New York Times or Economist think pieces, but is selling more digital fabrication equipment to every day users than any other company in the world.

To show how these things can come full circle, Cricut turned industrial vinyl/paper cutters into a kitchen friendly tool called the “Cricut Cake” that can digitally cut out fondant for cake decorating and sells it for under $400. It will take a lot of innovation to bring a laser cutter down to that cost, but it is easy to see how it could happen conceptually. Just as Pinterest flew under the radar of the tech cognescenti, Cricut is huge in the suburbs, but not so much in hacker spaces.

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This pancake project is also just cool looking on a purely aesthetic level. The spiral design is neat and you can imagine how all sorts of fun customizations would be possible from illustrative decorative designs to CPC (Cost per Cake) advertising. Disneyworld restaurants are already famous for Mickey Mouse pancakes, now your local molecular gastronomy restaurant can offer brunch emblazoned with Durer etchings.

Tim O’Reilly has a saying that to see what is coming in the future, you should pay attention to the “Alpha Geeks” and that hobbyists will create the future for fun before the capitalists do. This project seems like a perfect embodiment of that statement. I have no doubt that these tools will revolutionize the kitchen as well as the factory and the team at CutLaserCut is giving us a sneak preview of how it will happen.

Thanks to Andrew Sliwinski for the tip!

Skier Jonny Mosely tweeted this picture of a sign that helped joggers equate their physical exertion to caloric intake. Depressingly you have to log 4.5 miles of running to work off one slice of pizza. It’s an unfortunate calculation, but it is certainly better to have the information.

What if the same principle was applied to amusement gluttony? If you read Clay Shirky’s excellent book “The Cognitive Surplus” you’ll learn that the time American’s spend watching TV every year would be sufficient to complete 3-4 new projects with the size and importance of Wikipedia. To put it another way, we could have 3-4 new excellent resources that make the world a better place OR we can have season 19 of Two and a Half Men”.

What if there was a “Nutrition Facts Label” or simple rules of thumb people could use to measure investment in learning a skill vs. watching TV. For example:

- The time you spend watching “Friends” (8 seasons x 24 episodes X 30 min) you could have mastered 20 new recipes.

- The average American watches 4.2 hours of TV a day. If you cut that in half, you could speak passable Italian in a year. You could speak fluently in 2.

- Cutting out a single one hour cable news program a week saves 52 hours, enough time to make a quilt or hope chest that will last for 50+ years.

Junk food and TV have a lot in common. Both are plentiful and very enjoyable in the short term. It is easy to add calories or lose hours without some kind of sign posts. Even with those numbers it is helpful to have tools like the sign above to be reminded of context. Maybe its time for a “DIY Nutrition Facts Label”?

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O’Reilly Media tweeted a request to it’s fans asking them for pictures of their “O’Reilly Shelf”. If you’ve spent any time around software or IT professionals you know instantly what they mean. Row after row of deep blue, sea foam, and bright pink spines  interspersed with a cover lying face up featuring a wood cut etching of an animal. It is a brand built over decades that stands for the highest quality technical documentation. Many other technical publishers have also developed distinct brands APress with their bold black and gold scheme, the “Learn X in 24 Hours” series, and many other less successful series.

It is a little surprising that there isn’t a similar strategy in the broader DIY Market. Why isn’t there an O’Reilly equivalent for fiber crafts like quilting or crocheting? Wood working or DIY repair? There is the “Teach Yourself Visually” series, but that doesn’t seem to be leading the market.

There are some understandable reasons why there isn’t a dominant publishing “Brand” in the DIY space that matches O’Reilly’s reach or breadth.

1. Craft/DIY books are inherently visual. You can thumb through a book on quilting or car restoration and have a good sense if the book has the info you’re looking for. Trying to make the same determination while flipping through 500ish pages of Ruby syntax is a lot harder.

2. Craft/DIY books are often personality driven. Martha Stewart is a bigger “brand” than anyone who has published her books.

However, the same arguments could be made about cooking and cookbooks where there are brands that cross subject matter. America’s Test Kitchen, Cooks Illustrated, and many other publishers have built names on quality, approach, and style that transcend subject matter. My guess is that the lack of DIY brands has more to do with history than market forces. The companies that publish books in that area tend to be small and evolved over decades serving niche audiences that became mainstream. Branding wasn’t a focus and hence these publishers evolved a series of new titles and didn’t advance a mission or belief system the way O’Reilly has. With the ability of ever smaller teams to create media brands and the growth of the DIY world, I would expect this to change soon.

Zach Klein, founder of College Humor, Vimeo, CPO at Boxee, and prolific angel investor is taking a swing at combining his expertise in the consumer internet world with a passion for handicraft in a new venture called DIY.org. The company has been quiet about its focus and goals, but here are some interesting hints:

It has an amazing domain name – I wonder if the .org TLD is significant in that there will be a non-profit component? Also, while it is a cool name I imagine the DIY network or B&Q the owners of DIY.com might consider a trademark suit?

Are they making DIY kits? – Founder and CEO Zach Klein posted a question to Quora asking which 3rd party logistics provider worked with BirchBox, the subscription commerce retailer.

Will there be a woodsy theme? – Between the bear claw logo, Klein’s Cabin focused Tumblr, and the desks in the DIY office there is a distinct Jermiah Johnson feel to the brand. Will this be a DIY site in the broadest sense or a back to nature focused endeavor?

They have some seriously smart people – Check out the CV of Andrew Sliwinski, one of the co-founders of DIY. He seems to have done everything from web development to motion graphics to hardware production and show management.  Whatever they choose to focus on, it seems they will have the talent to execute.

Is it a kid focused endeavor? – This photo suggests that the activities they have planned are at least partially kid friendly, but are they taking Klutz’s “Book Plus” concept to the web?

It is too soon to tell with certainty, but my guess is that the initial offering will be something like Instructables with a more user friendly UI married to a BirchBox style subscription ecommerce offering. Whatever it is, I’m excited for the launch. Crafting is a $30B market, but has received only a minuscule amount of attention relative to the amount of investment in music and gaming startups. This seems like a smart team, going after a massive, underserved market so interesting things are bound to emerge. Keep an eye on them.

Collector’s Weekly is an awesome blog that covers the world of “antiques” from the Victorian era to the modern day. Everything from Daguerreotypes to screen printed posters made at Facebook’s HQ in San Francisco.

According to their excellent article a Facebook designer named Ben Berry created the “Analog Research Lab” in an unused part of the company’s headquarters. He made posters to commemorate internal hackathons, propaganda style posters to institutionalize lessons from respected managers e.g. “Done is better than perfect”, and others that helped infuse the tech and hacker focused company with a little design sense.

It speaks well of Facebook’s culture and willingness to experiment that they allow a project like this to continue. In most companies of their size, with the amount of scrutiny they receive, a project like this would be stamped out by HR or some other image focused part of the company.

It is also a great reminder that in an age where we can connect with people across the globe instantly via $200 computers in our pocket that there is still an deep human desire for tangible things. While the cost of online storage continues to plummet, the amount of space in a cubicle or living room stays roughly the same. Wall space is precious and if you decide to hang a poster it has meaning. Web meets World.

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Newbury Comics is a retail chain in New England that builds miniature palaces to pop culture. It started out as a comic book store on Boston’s Newbury Street 2o years ago, but has evolved over the years to sell music, toys, gadgets, fashion, and a whole bunch of Twilight ephemera.

Founder Mike Dreese is an MIT Alum who applied the intelligent analysis and blunt tone of an engineer to the more traditionally right-brained worlds of fashion and pop-culture. He gave a talk at a ecommerce event I attended last week and shared some interesting thoughts on his business and history.

Scott Kirsner moderated and recorded the audio, which is well worth a listen, but a few quick hits follow:

• Newbury Comics has 30 stores, ~$70MM in revenue, ~$25MM of which is collected online.
• Dreese was candid and said that 80% of CDs in their store could be had cheaper online, but retail was often about impulse or urgency.
• Retail is all about merchandising. Find “winners”, the products people must have. Buy a lot of them and charge 20% more than you normally would. Dreese said a replica pin from the “Hunger Games” was an example of this. They pre-ordered a bunch and when they proved to be popular, they raised the price making it one of their best performing products.
• Retail is collapsing. Newbury Comics is opening new stores in malls which used to be out of their price range. They have been able to rent mall space now because the rents are coming way down and not because their business has become better. His outlook for Best Buy and Target were especially grim.
• They grew their online business from $10 Million to $20 Million in one year by leveraging Amazon and Ebay. Dreese repeatedly stated that he believes the future of ecommerce is on sourcing products and taking risk on warehousing and production, not creating new distribution channels.
• Retailers have to take risks. One of the things that gives Newbury Comics an edge is giving product partners working capital to manufacture goods to ensure they have supply. Bigger retailers do this routinely, but few at Newbury’s scale do.
• There are many other nuggets, so listen to the podcast for more insights.

VistaPrint uses print on demand technology to mass customized business cards, wedding invitations, and other printed ephemera. They are easily one of the largest mass customization businesses with revenues of close to $750MM. They have recently started to dabble in television advertising and the subject of their commercials are the small and medium sized businesses they serve. The commercial embedded below highlights a small company called “YouBar” which will customize a granola bar to your taste from a list of fixed ingredients.

It is a neat milestone in that it is one of the first major mass customization companies to utilize mainstream marketing (the custom M&M’s are the only other example that comes to mind). It is also great to see them focusing on another business that combines the internet and physical production to customize products for end users. Hopefully, the campaign will continue and many more interesting businesses will have a chance to draft of Vistaprint’s pioneering success.

I’ve been writing about 3D Printing since when I first created this blog in late 2008. I wrote about MakerBot when they were first announced and many, many times subsequently. I was impressed by the concept and thought the team was cool, but wasn’t sure about the utility. I had a lot of doubts:

- My company had a $50K 3D printer and compared to that, the output from the MakerBot was pretty weak. Why bother?

- What would I do if it broke? The buzz in maker circles was that the tech support wasn’t great.

- What could I do with such poor resolution?

- Did I have the skills to actually build this thing? What if I spent $1,000 and 40 hours and it didn’t turn on.

But, my arguments started to wear down. The MakerBot guys kept improving. Interesting capabilities were demonstrated by pioneers of this new technology. I saw sample parts at MakerFaires. A freshman in high school told me he built one. I was putting off prototyping simple projects on the machine at work or with Shapeways because the cost was so high. I got tired of typing and wanted to start tinkering.

Then I saw the RC Koopa Shell racers and decided to buy one. This product finally made it clear that at the right scale and with the right the design, the MakerBot could be an amazing tool. I waited until the Thing-O-Matic went on sale after Thanksgiving and and pressed the virtual print button.

I’ve successfully assembled my kit (with a fair amount of frustration), started printing, and will be sharing my builds soon.

The Rice Krispie treat has remained largely unchanged from its origins in the 1920′s to the modern day. Maybe your mom would throw in chocolate chips, but I had never seen as wild a variation as this multi-color version made with Fruit Loops.

It also took the Kellogg company over 7o years to start selling a packaged version of the treat that has been a bake sale staple for its entire existence. This seems like the food equivalent of not putting wheels on luggage for 30 or so years after wide spread commercial aviation.

The DIY culture seems to be changing this. Last year, a woman invented a new kind of cookie by baking an Oreo inside a chocolate chip cookie. Within 2 weeks the recipe had evolved on the internet and many experiments were conducted.

Just like Darwin’s finches adapted to the varied environments of the Galapagos, DIYers are adapting to the “fame” that the internet provides. Adaptation doesn’t lead to survival in this case, but social capital. Inventive chefs now have an audience that might only include their Facebook friends, but still they become the Martha Stewart of their circle. In some cases, a cake a mother makes for her child can end up in the New York Times as was the case with Anya Richardson’s Angry Birds cake.

Fruit flies are the common medium to do experiments in genetics because of their quick reproduction cycles. I think food might be the equivalent in the DIY world because of the low cost of experimentation and easy access to tools. Today we see the DIY influence in cakes, tomorrow cars?