packaging as content

August 20, 2008

Licensed Lip Balm Packaging

A screen shot of Valeri Thalen-Passon’s flickr set of lip balm packaging

Gift Fair on Sunday, one of the booths at which I lingered, was License 2 Play, a distributor specializing in licensed products. In that booth alone, was enough “packaging-as-content” to keep me digressing for a very long time. For now, I’ll just have to try and confine myself to the licensed lip-balm thread.

Although I’ve noticed a lot of lip balm varieties out there, I never knew that there was a line of General Mills Cereal lip balms or a line of Betty Crocker lip balms. (Both, manufactured by Boston America.) So many food-related flavors for something you’re not actually meant to eat.

I like it when the backing card of a carded blister-pack is in the shape of some other type of packaging… the Betty Crocker frosting canister, for example. …and all the die-cut cards shaped like bottles or cans, for the beverage-related lip balms. (Lotta Luv is a company that makes a lot of that type.)

Finding vpassion’s flickr site was a real eye-opener. She has an impressive collection of lip balm packaging—a lot of it of the licensed product variety.

Photo on left from Lip Treats web site; photo on right from vpassion’s flickr photostream

(a little more about licensed lip balm packaging, after the jump…)

Two more photos from vpassion’ s flickr set. With the heavy black border, the die cut Hawaiian Punch card on the left looks a lot like a Wacky Pack.

I also found this post (on irnbru’s Xanga blog) about lip balms for sale at Claire’s. I used to be very familiar with what Claire’s stores were carrying, but it’s it been a while now since I was in one. Irnbru’s visit to Claire’s led him to discover another interesting product tie-in: Aquafina!

Given my recent dwellings on bottled water, his photo of branded, water-flavored lip balm was too good to pass up.