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. With “Littered with sharp plastic shards”
Posted by Rob Walker on February 9, 2007
Posted Under: The Designed Life
Posted Under: The Designed Life
Consumer Reports looks at really bad packaging, singling out a heavily defended Oral B toothbrush:
A tight fit between the plastic skin and cardboard thwarted scissors. Our tester grabbed a box cutter but hacked up the box as an unavoidable result. After removing the clamshell and opening the box, she had to dislodge parts from a foam case, yank off one plastic bag covering the power cord and another protecting additional components, then pop perforations on smaller clamshells shielding the toothbrush heads. Her work table was littered with sharp plastic shards.
Praised by the magazine: Packaging for a Logitech mouse, a different Oral-B brush, and others.
Via the WSJ’s (recommended!) Informed Reader blog.
Further diversion may be found at MKTG Tumblr, and the Consumed Facebook page.
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Reader Comments
Have you seen OpenX? I read about it last year in Business 2.0: It’s a safe way to open this kind of horrible packaging. (I have no connection with the company, but love the product.) There’s a spring-loaded retractable knife that’s just a few centimeters long. There’s a kind of hook with a recessed blade, too. So you use a switch to push (against the spring pressure) the knife out to cut the packaging enough to insert the hook, which, when pulled, tears open the plastic in a controlled fashion.
I showed it to my mother-in-law when she was visiting recently, and then sent her three (she has about 20 pairs of scissors in the house, so I needed to defeat those scissors through quantity), and she loves it, too.
I hadn’t heard of that, but thanks for the tip. I found their site — it looks like’s basically designed specifically to deal with awful packaging. Kind of amazing. But, a market-based solution I guess, right?