Klenz-Worx Date: 2005-02-08 Category: Consumable / Personal Product Price: 50 Target Audience: Personal products manufacturers Description:
If you're a needle drug user who's on the road, you may know how to
clean your rig perfectly well, but still lack access to bleach, distilled
water, and sanitary containers. What are you supposed to do, carry a
supply of cups and bottles around everywhere? Klenz-Worx has a better
way for you to treat yourself right. The one-use hypodermic sanitizing
system, available at willing retailers nationwide, gives you the fresh
bleach and water you need in a conveniently portable, foil-sealed plastic
container-- and at just 99 cents, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg! The
compact kit resembles one of those single-serving breakfast cereal
packs, but with multiple mini compartments. Just poke your spike
through the foil on each of the five clearly-numbered spots, then draw,
shake, and squirt out in sequence, and you're ready to go. Compartment
two contains the bleach, while the rest hold distilled water, so you get
the recommended three good rinses after disinfection. Sweet! And, next
time you're sending supplies to the Third World as part of a large-scale
relief effort, throw in some Klenz-Worx kits for general medical use by
the people down there. They'll certainly be appreciated!
Mint Culture Brands Date: 2005-01-24 Category: Consumable / Confection Price: 50 Target Audience: Altoids, or any hard-confectionary company that wants to compete against them Description:
Decades ago, the wide landscape of heavily-advertised cigarette brands offered smokers a way of identifying who they were,
while socially-shared lighting etiquette acted as a springboard for casual interaction. As a social tool, this is a powerful
combination, especially for singles. But today, many once-meaningful brands are in decline, along with the general smoking
population.
Similarly, walking a purebred dog presents a statement of personal values and taste, while offering a pettable, first-contact
excuse and a rich underlying culture that invites discussion. But realistically, you can't bring your dog everywhere you go.
The makers of Altoids have developed an enormous market for pocket mints, but frankly, opening an Altoids tin-- no matter
what flavor-- says absolutely zilch about who you are. The world of mints, such as it is, lacks cultural complexity, and as a
result, it also provides no hooks for initiating casual discourse-- even though the candies are great for sharing.
Mint Culture Brands realizes the social and cultural potential that the generic Altoids brand lacks. Over the course of five
years, the company will roll out over thirty brands of pocket mints, each with its own unique, fully-conceived and
beautifully-executed identity. Interesting taste formulations blended from diverse flavors and perfumes are personality-matched
to tins (or other styles of containers) that boast innovative package design and detailed, statement-making artwork. Every
pocket-sized pack is a conversation piece in its own right (and an industrial design boutique's dream assignment), whether it's
targeted towards Benson & Hedges smokers, Labrador owners, or Porsche drivers. The packages should hold a lot of mints,
but also be expensive enough that it's completely reasonable to want to sample a flavor before actually buying one. "Excuse
me-- may I try one of those Absinthe Pastilles? You know, that's long been my favorite Toulouse-Lautrec painting, on the tin..."
Primary Juice Date: 2004-12-15 Category: Consumable / Beverage Price: 50 Target Audience: Fruit juice companies Description:
Simple shapes and primary colors are good for young
children because they constitute the building blocks
of visual perception. Yet, tragically, some
unthinking parents pack their kids' lunches with
profit-maximizing fruit juice blends,
robbing them of their ability to distinguish
individual flavors beyond simply recognizing the muddy slurry
coming up their straw as "juice." Primary Juice
rejects this crippling of our childrens' developing
tastes with a line of pure, elemental fruit juices
such as apple, cranberry, tangerine, and quince. Sweetening and
dilution, where required (as with cranberry) are given
by refined fructose and branch water, neutral
ingredients that don't detract from the original fruit. Dishonest, flavor-marring
sweetening agents like grape juice
concentrate, agave extract, and evaporated cane juice,
need not apply! Older children can graduate to the
Primary Juice Varietals line, which includes Pink Lady
Apple, Cabernet Franc grape, and other wholesome
juices pressed from single-variety fruit, each
carefully selected to further refine your child's
palate-- and by extension, his or her overall sophistication and
future likelihood of success. Turn your Baby Einstein into a
Toddler Brillat-Savarin!
Healthee Organically Sliced Bread Date: 2004-11-30 Category: Consumable / Food Price: Free Target Audience: Industrial bakeries Description:
Marketed towards uneducated and immigrant consumers who might miss the distinction between adjective and adverb, this premium-priced bread is packaged to appear all-organic. In fact, however, artificial preservatives give the loaf a thirty-day shelf life, and its rough, whole-grain appearance comes from an inexpensive combination of wood cellulose (derived from sawdust), synthetic binding agents, and caramel coloring. The packaged bread is formulated for production at minimum cost, with a generous percentage of corn sweetener added in order to make it popular with children. While the product itself contains many artificial and inorganically-grown ingredients, the process by which it is sliced-- feeding it through a standard industrial bread-slicing machine-- uses none of these. This allows the bread to be labeled as "Organically Sliced."
Ayahuasca (Perfume) Date: 2004-04-29 Category: Consumable / Personal Product Price: 40 Target Audience: Perfume, fashion, and luxury goods manufacturers.
Description:
cK One? Weak. Today's young adults crave a scent with authenticity, identity, cultural gravitas. Inspired by the ancient but newly-popular hallucinogen of the same name, Ayahuasca perfume recalls visions, high plateaus, the rainforest, shamanic magic, great lost civilizations, spiritual cleansing, and cosmic truth. It shares some of the same forbidden-drug associations as YSL's Opium, but it's young, experiential, and New World-- not old, dusty, withered, and confined. The bottle refers to the starkly geometrical stone pyramids and gold work of the Incas, while the scent itself has an amber base, with herbals/botanicals and a touch of wood smoke.
Chateau Chien Taureau Date: 2004-04-02 Category: Consumable / Beverage Price: Two cases Target Audience: California State University, Fresno Description:
Many people don't realize that Fresno State University produces some really good wines out of its Viticulture and Enology department. But unfortunately, the "Fresno State Winery" appellation is a turn-off for more closed-minded varietal consumers. Enter Chateau Chien Taureau, Fresno State's new, upscale wine label. They're some of the exact same award-winning wines that are bottled under the Fresno State label-- specifically, their Cabernet, Syrah, Barbera, Muscat, and Orange Muscat (and not their Tailgate Red). But they cost a few dollars more and have a fancier-sounding name, in order to appeal to the insecure wine buyer. It's that simple, and everyone wins: Certain consumers get a whole new set of wines that they can accept and enjoy, and Fresno State University gets another source of income-- which they desperately need these days, just like all public educational institutions in California.
Thai Iced Tea Cheesecake Date: 2003-11-12 Category: Consumable / Food Price: Free Target Audience: Progressive cheesecake bakers Description:
Title says it all. Could somebody please get on this?
Set-ups Date: 2003-11-12 Category: Consumable / Food Price: 100 Target Audience: Producers of bagged salad products. Description:
Crisp lettuce and tomato slices, just enough for one sandwich, individually wrapped in nitrogen-filled plastic bags. Forget that wilting head of brown-tinged iceberg or that mushy, butchered half-tomato-- Set-ups stay fresh in the fridge longer than many luncheon meats, and are ready when you need them. Just open one up, and make your sandwich deli-licious!
TOTS (Things wrapped in Other Things) Fast-Food Chain Date: 2003-09-24 Category: Consumable / Food Price: 1% of net Target Audience: Franchisable food operation entrepeneurs Description:
Tastes and cuisines may differ, but all humans love eating things wrapped in other things-- think dolma (Mediterranean), dim sum (China), canneloni (Italy), pierogi (Eastern Europe), and sushi (Japan). In every land, tenderly wrapped, handheld or bite-sized delicacies are both native favorites and treats for travellers seeking a tasty meal on the go. TOTS brings all of these treats together under one roof. With 30 different globe-spanning finger foods to choose from, everyone leaves happy, well-fed and unsoiled by burger or pizza drippings-- whether they're kids, drivers pulling off the highway, or office workers on lunch break. In urban
areas, TOTS franchises benefit from the innovative practice of subcontracting with top local ethnic restaurants to supply TOTS-compatible dishes, aggregating the best local offerings to allow diners enjoy locally-produced dumplings, pakora, and mini-burritos (for example) in the same meal. TOTS-- the food franchise of the future!
Bliss Series Paper Napkins Date: 2003-08-04 Category: Consumable / Paper Product Price: 100 Target Audience: Target (since they're such a design leader), paper napkin manufacturers, Urban Outfitters (as a back-up, since they're much lower volume) Description:
Print designs on paper towels have been getting more interesting recently. Bounty, for example, has heated up the genre with its "Designer's Touch" and four-color "Fun Prints" series, the latter of which licenses characters like Viacom's Rugrats and Hallmark's wisecracking Maxine. Alas, print design for household paper napkins has been unfortunately lagging, staying the familiar course with ho-hum pastel flowers. (Perhaps this is due to the innovation-stealing influence of paper party napkins, which traditionally have brighter colors and fewer "rules"?) How boring! The up-and-coming designers behind the Bliss series recognize that paper napkins are an important signpost in people's lives -- far more important than paper towels, a bridge between party-throwing singlehood and the cloth-napkin formality of married life. The bold prints on Bliss napkins take familiar kitchen-print totems of gardening and rural life, jack up the color, and take the images themselves to the edge of self-parody: Ridiculously cute daisies and ladybugs, hilariously sentimental outhouses. The result is a paper napkin that everyone will love, for different reasons. For hipsters, they convey playfulness and humor, offering a subversive parody-critique of domestic values and inspiring late-night discussions of culture and iconography. For marrieds, bringing out the Bliss napkins and leaving the cloth behind is a way to recapture the casual, floor-sitting informality and flirtatious, unsettled group dynamics of the old days. And for the simple, the prints offer familiar, appealing themes in brighter colors.
Rememo Pads Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Consumable / Office Products Price: 100.00 Target Audience: Avery, Mead, etc. Description:
With regular notebooks and memo pads, every page looks exactly the same, which makes it tough to find that particular page of notes you're looking for. Rememo has a better way: each of the pad's 100 pages looks different. Page colors are white, pink, or pastel blue, yellow, or green. In addition, each page is bordered two distinct, alternating symbols in two different colors: a letter or number, and a distinctive picture, such as a triangle, a cow, a dagger, or Abraham Lincoln, in black, blue, green, or red.
As you take notes and glance at the page repeatedly, your mind can't help but associate these visual cues with where you are and what you're writing. Then, years later, it'll be much easier to find the right page in your notes. "I remember -- I wrote them on a pink page with black 3's and green Lincolns..."
Sacred Leaf Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Consumable / Tobacco Price: 200.00 Target Audience: Description:
Sacred Leaf is turning tobacco into the ultimate in Political Correctness. It's a complete tobacco home growers kit, which includes heirloom seeds, organic nutrient soil, a solar-powered curing box, and one season's worth of curing mixture. A soy ink / hemp paper booklet provides instructions, a romantic history of pre-industrial tobacco, and some nature poems labelled "Traditional Roanoke Meditation." The back cover states in modest italics, "A nonzero percentage of Sacred Leaf's proceeds benefit the preservation of Native American customs and culture throughout the US and Mexico."
Undie Bond Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Consumable / Office Products Price: 100.00 Target Audience: Paper manufacturers Description:
You may be a conscientious recycler, but no one will take your old undies, tatty t-shirts, and other unsalvagable garments, so you have no choice but to throw them all away. And to think, cotton is one of the most resource-intensive crops of all - you might as well put a gun to Mother Earth's head! The makers of 100% Cotton Undie Bond paper offer an alternative: they'll take anything you've got with an all-cotton label, and turn it into paper. Don't believe the so-called post-consumer recycled cotton fiber papers from the big paper companies - they come from institutional tablecloth, towel, and linens suppliers, who routinely sell them off after just one use. Undie Bond is truly post-consumer; it comes from people like you, who care enough to send boxes of old underwear to the Undie Bond factory, third class postal rate. And each pound sent in earns five cents off any paper purchase. The beautifully textured, archival paper is a cult favorite for PhD dissertations, and features a distinctive "bloomers" watermark.
ShOtgun Beer Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Consumable / Beverage Price: 200.00 Target Audience: Regional beer company that wants to introduce a canned beer nationally. Description:
Dude: do you like to party? Do you like to chug? Say hello to ShOtgun Beer. Always canned - never bottled - ShOtgun creates an instant raging chugfest. Diagrams and instructions printed on each pre-scored can explain how to drink the beer "ShOtgun style" (as if you didn't already know). And each six-pack comes with its own "party spike," to poke the hole with, right on the "O" target - above the liability disclaimer, which your pre-law brothers may commit to memory, and recite reverently before opening each can.
Napa Valley Mouton Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Consumable / Food Price: Free Target Audience: Niman Ranch, other boutique ranches Description:
Sophisticated Americans are ready for mutton -- especially if it's from their own back yard. Napa Valley Mouton's skilled shepherd-professionals travelled to Europe, where the meat is a popular mainstay, and acquired a variety of breeding sheep known for their excellent flavor. The flocks now live a carefree existence of California sun and Pacific breezes. Sheep are slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law and the meat is completely kosher – as well as completely delicious. Say hello to the other dark meat!
