Moving out of your parents’ place is really cool. But guess what? It is not cheap. When they first move out, young adults live in almost empty homes, with little to no decor whatsoever. And, with a limited budget, comes a place that might look more like a barren wasteland than a home. Collector 55, an online interior design boutique with a young audience, wanted to do something to help them. So, they briefed us to develop an idea that could make a difference, but it needed to have design thinking at its core. Because that’s what this brand is all about.

What do you do with the card box pack when you buy furniture? You throw it away. Well, with a little design thinking, can’t we make something useful out of it?

Our idea is to create The Furniture Packages: packages that become other pieces of furniture. Buy a lamp, get a night stand. Buy a table, get a chair. We did 3 models: night stand, chair and wine holder, with 3 texture options each. The assembly instructions were printed inside the boxes, making it easy to assemble and use.

Just by designing die lines out of card boxes, we gave our young audience the possibility of adding up to their homes without blowing up their budgets. Also, we gave them an environmental reason to do it, since it’s reusing material that would go to waste.

Collector 55’s audience is comprised mainly of young adults. People that enjoy art, work with art or like to be around art. The problem is that when they move out of their parents’ house, their budgets are limited, and they can’t decorate their homes like they would like to. Our strategy was to provide a low-cost option to quickly turn their places around, by using the card boxes of the furnitures as additional pieces of furniture. The rationale behind this is that if we created a positive experience in this stage, they will be clients moving forward, when their budgets will naturally increase as time goes by.

The design elements we used were sharp angles, an overlap of bright colors to contrast with the cardboard box’s natural colors and a shape that harmonized with the object the package had stored. For example, the nightstand for the lamp was designed to match the lamp inside, making them look like a single design concept.

The production process took 3 months total. In the first month, we did sketches and initial concepts. In the second month, we went to 3D modeling and prototyping. In the third month, we implemented the web interface and supply chain adjustments that allowed the project to be embedded into the Collector 55’s web store. When the client added the product to the cart and then checked it out, there was an extra step where he or she could had to choose the Furniture Package that would carry the purchased item.

Collector 55 is an online design boutique, which means it doesn’t have a significant sales volume. The average is around 100 items a month. Our project ran for about a month, and 80 boxes were put in stock. They ran out in 2 weeks. For the brand and what it stands for, it worked perfectly. We got awesome client feedback. The brand is in talks to further expand “The Furniture Packages”, and make it the standard packaging for all their items.