Package Design: Death to Brinkswrap!

The other day I received a name-brand electric shaver and a beard trimmer. Each comes in see-through retail packaging. In fact, the items were encased in clear hard plastic that contains a dash of Kryptonite or something, because it's insane how difficult these clamshells are to open. A pair of serious household scissors will do the job, but at the expense of sore fingers and at least a couple of minutes of hard labor that will have sweat pouring from your brow (and, if you're like me, words pouring from your mouth that would give Michael Powell the vapors).

I'd like to coin a term for this kind of over-the-top packaging: Brinkswrap. Rhymes with shrinkwrap, but it gets its name from the company that's synonymous with armored trucks.

The frustration of buying anything in brinkswrap is worsened by the realization that you now possess this product and it should be yours to do with as you wish. After all, it was paid for, it's legitimately yours, and yet the joys of ownership are waning before you've even liberated it from its stiff, forbidding cocoon. Post-sale, even with your money now fattening the manufacturer's bottom line, the corporate package designers are still treating you as if you were trying to avail yourself of the five-finger discount. (And that's not even considering that we all know that the now-useless plastic hull — so thick you could hurt someone with the ragged cut line — will most likely end up in a landfill, joined by millions upon millions more like it.)

The New York Times has a good op-ed piece about brinkswrap products and their ilk, accompanied by some playful graphics of a toy that has to be freed from a block of concrete with a hammer and chisel.

Me, I've written about advertising, marketing, and design hundreds of times, and I consider myself a fairly savvy consumer. But I'd never pondered one reason author Henry Petroski gives for the packaging trend:

"Once .... the packaging has been cut, ripped and torn apart, many people would be embarrassed to return the toy."

And that's what manufacturers want: fewer returns. Seems obvious now.

On the other hand: Don't they also want to keep customers from grumbling? Don't they want to make the ownership experience a positive one from the get-go? Better yet: Couldn't they make opening the package enjoyable, a tactile and esthetic pleasure that, in the consumer's mind, strengthens the rightness of the buying decision? I'm on my third iPod (because I keep upgrading to more capacious models), and I marvel every time at how joyous it is just to open the box it comes in. With its packaging alone, the iPod communicates the exact opposite of the plastic-armored commodity MP3 players that are functionally somewhat similar but simply Not the Real Thing. The packaging of Apple's player says that here's a company that thinks and cares about the end user — at a moment when I haven't even touched the actual product yet. I'm hard-pressed to come up with other brands and products that consistently reach that level of design excellence.

Most manufacturers are too myopic to grasp that they're in business to serve customers through every step of the process, from providing top-notch pre-sale information to telling buyers how they can safely dispose of the product once it has reached the end of its life. Package design has a big role to play in all this. Improving it is not the same as catering to hifalutin design snobs; it is simply smart business. Think about it: Apple often manages to sell its products at a premium, which suggests that the packaging (which is clearly a part of the brand's, um, Gestalt) contributes to its profit margins. Done right, everyone wins. It's a lesson that other makers of consumer products might want to take to heart if they know what's right for their bottom line — and for my poor, battered fingers.