No one will deny that there’s pleasure in buying stuff. Along with life and liberty, the delight of consuming unnecessary goods is one of the guiding principles of our dear country.
But there’s an equal pleasure, albeit subtler, in finding clever ways to repurpose old goods. And whether it happens by choice or necessity (or a confluence of both), we’re going to see a lot more of this in the coming decade.
A recent stellar example comes courtesy of Tokyo design firm Dentsu, who designed a wrapping paper for vegetable vendors by printing old newspapers with colorful dots and stripes. The resulting paper is an attractive, low-cost option for vendors who desire both the practical qualities of newspaper (its moisture retention keeps vegetables fresh) and the visual flair of a decorated material.
Did Dentsu’s project work? Vegetable vendors who used the printed paper saw their sales grow by 20%, and the firm won an Art Director Club award for their work. Not bad.
Before Labyrinth, before The Muppets were making appearances on The Orson Welles Show, before Sesame Street sparked a revolution in children’s entertainment, Jim Henson was just a University of Maryland graduate with a B.S. in Home Economics, experimenting with televised puppeteering in five-minute segments on a local NBC affiliate. But like most of us, he still had to find a way to pay the bills. Hence, some of the weirdest and funniest commercials of the 1960s. While most of the ads on TV in that day were still relying on cardboard representations of the nuclear family grinning with acidic alacrirty while they delivered straightforward salutes to prefabricated post-war aspiration, Henson and his felt creations brought something unexpected into the ad world:
…till then, [advertising] agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh.
How is this not an episode of Mad Men, yet? Watch below to see Henson getting away with murder (sometimes literally) thanks to a motley crew of adorably lovable irreverent proto-Muppets. And if you’ve got eight minutes to spare, check out this oddball romp of a metafictional behind-the-scenes film looking into the Muppets, Inc. marketing department.
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