Category Archives: packaging

Salt Petre

This stuff is mentioned in quite a few old stories, mostly for making gunpowder and causing impotence.

Gunpowder & Impotence would be a good name for a country album.

These Suds Ain’t Duds

Midcentury-ish boxes of soap of the following brands: Oxydol, Ivory Snow, Nola, Vel and Duz
Midcentury-ish boxes of soap of the following brands: Oxydol, Ivory Snow, Nola, Vel and Duz

This last Saturday was laundry day at the North Star Auction in Mandan, North Dakota.

Also, back in the day, laundry soap and dish soap were often the same soap.

Check out the sweet package art.

We used to soften our fabrics, by the fire at Camp Waconda.

A vintage bottle of Sta-Puf Fabric Softener Rinse
A vintage bottle of Sta-Puf Fabric Softener Rinse

If you drink decaffeinated, you might be a…

A vintage can of Kaffee Hag Coffee
A vintage can of Kaffee Hag Coffee

Mulva the Macaroni Girl

At an auction on Saturday, I was digging the packaging for Minnesota brand macaroni shells.

I can imagine the girl having a Selma Diamond voice and she says — “I like to stick the macaronis up my nose.” — followed by a strange rattling noise as she laughs.

Limited Edition Trump Tic Tac — Grab ’em today!

Trump Orange Tic Tac

It’s gonna be yuge.

Beauty is in the eye of the beh… AHHHHHHH!

I saw this floor display for Mission Athletic Care in our local Lowe’s Home Improvement store and I can’t decide if this assembled quirk is a design fail or design win.

Eye caramba!

Eye caramba!

Let’s call it a fawin.

Sometimes my contact lenses feel like this.

Sometimes my contact lenses feel like this.

Heinz shows us that not all labels are bad.

Heinzsight. I love it when somebody takes a brand and puts more into it than they have to. In this case, Heinz did some sweet seasonal ketchup bottle labels — They didn’t have to, but they did, and that made it better. Brand personality, yo.

Groovy work, Heinz. I hope you do something like this again soon.

NOTE: I was told there was also a summer beachball tomato label, but alas, I was not in time.

You can’t lick this stamp collection (because someone else already did).

On January 2nd, 2016, I won an eBay auction for a lot of nine comic books from the late-60s and early-70s. Along with my winning bid price, I paid an additional five bucks for economy shipping.

When I received an eBay alert that they had shipped, I noticed that it didn’t include a tracking number, which is kind of unusual these days. Then when I received the package on January 7th, I found out why.


This dude didn’t just go old school, he went old-old school, meeting the $3.22 in postage with stamps. And I’m not talking Ingrid Bergman and Charlie Brown forever stamps from 2015; at least one of the stamps he used is over a century old. Incredible and crazy cool.

It was time to give my Google-Fu a workout, and the following is what I discovered. Continue reading

“In the future, everyone will be hydrated for 15 minutes.”

In 1983, Andy Warhol created over 40 screen prints featuring Perrier bottles.

In 2013, Perrier created 4 Perrier bottle labels as a tribute to Andy Warhol.

In 2015, Clayton Hove found them on a dusty K-Mart shelf in Bismarck, North Dakota, and bought them because he thought they were kinda neat.