packaging as content

June 13, 2009

Unpackaged

Health-food shop’s advertising cards are foil printed over used cereal & detergent boxes

The concept for the London health-food store, Unpackaged, is that they will sell you unpackaged produce and grains, etc. The customers are encouraged to come prepared with their own containers. While this concept is in keeping with current thinking about sustainable shopping, it is really not a new idea. This is exactly how shopkeepers used to do it. (As I just quoted The Encyclopedia of Ephemera in the previous post: One 17th-century London tea-man’s advertisement suggests that the customer should come provided with ‘a convenient box’)

The brand identity for Unpackaged was handled by London based design studio Multistorey.

It’s quite a challenge to brand something that removes the very thing that is the usual vehicle for branding — packaging. … We developed a logo that uses a classic jar shape, a jar being a container that can be re-used an infinite amount of times and have universal use. It also introduces the idea that this brand is about packaging or rather the lack of it.

from Multistorey’s web site

(More photos after the fold…)