Box Vox

packaging as content

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May 19, 2011

Mated Container Units

InterlockingBottlePatents

Yesterday’s post about the similar interlocking bottles, raised a number of questions. The patent drawings above date from 1963 to 2008, each showing a different patented method of connecting separate bottles. There are plenty of products that can be sold in pairs — shampoo & conditioner; 2-part epoxy; oil & vinegar — but what are consumers to make of it when these products are sold in interlocking bottles?

Are they anthropomorphic couples? Are they happily married? Are they promiscuous? Or are they more like puzzle pieces fitting together?

LaterallyInterlocking

Or body parts fitting together?

Nestedbottlespatent
The 69-ish innuendo of yesterday’s bottle structure (and the single quote marks ‘’ in Joy Lin’s Hustler Lubricant concept) is even more explicit in Franck Legoupil’ 2001 patent for a “Container Assemble of Two Nested Containers,” pictured above.

This same symmetrical gender-geometry is also at work in the “Mated Container Units” patented by Juris M. Mednis in 1986:

“A multi-purpose container unit whose hollow body, neck and shoulder sections are proportioned and constructed in a manner that allows interfacing and mating with an identical or mirror image unit of like size… The container has a neck and a recessed portion along its vertical axis which accepts and provides safe harbor and protection to the neck and closure portion of the mated unit whose corresponding body recess, in turn, accepts the neck and closure portion of a second container of the mated unit…”

(See what the “Mated Container Units” look like, after the fold…)


MatedContainers

Why so much effort to combine identical bottles, rather than letting the bottles assume different genders? Yes, it’s cheaper to make one mold rather than two, but what makes these solutions so appealing and ingenious? Is this the elegant symmetry of yin yang? Or a subconscious metaphor for gay marriage?

I don’t know.

But, speaking of gay marriage… yesterday our Republican Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, called out fellow Republicans for (again) opposing NY’s gay marriage bill:

“They can fight the rising tide of marriage equality, betraying their party’s core principles, losing voters, killing jobs and ending up on the wrong side of history or they can provide the leadership and pass marriage equality”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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