Whipsaw president and chief designer Dan Harden remembers having a Daniel Boone lunch box growing up that was made of sheet metal and eventually rusted out.
“I loved that lunch box because it said something about who I was,” says Harden.
“There was an identity on the front of this thing, and I was able to carry lunch and create what you could call a social connectedness around the ceremony of lunch with other kids that had similar kinds of lunch boxes,” he says.
Though as a child he says he didn’t think about the social aspects that came with his lunch box these thoughts came into play when he was approached by Kinsco to design a lunch box.
Harden says when he is approached for a design project he seeks the biggest opportunities.
“How can we take a set of problems and use our particular skills and not only addressing that problem and solving that problem but also going beyond that by adding some emotional quotient that allows them to really touch people on a level that maybe they were unaware of to begin with,” Harden tells Axiom News.
Connecting with people on an emotional level sometimes means subconsciously reaching them so they feel a sense of connectedness with a brand or overall experience, he adds. When an object represents a bigger idea or deeper meaning it is often a lasting and winning product in the marketplace, he says.
The end result — the Yubo lunch box — is a product Harden says he enjoyed designing and when it was launched at last fall’s ABC's Kid Expo in Las Vegas the first year of production sold out within a couple days.
In the case of a lunch box there hadn’t been innovation for 50 years, which attracted Harden to the challenge.
He saw the potential to solve major problems such as how to clean a lunch box and make a lasting identity to the user.
Another challenge was environmental. Harden says they discovered more than five pounds of plastic and 10 pounds of paper in the form of food packaging are thrown away by each child annually. Lunches are often packed in bags with polyurethane foam between two walls of nylon which cannot be recycled or burned.
Whipsaw took on the environmental challenge through making Yubo with recyclable polypropylene and polyethylene, and creating dishwasher-safe food containers that are made to fit inside the box to eliminate the need for Ziploc bags or other packaging.
Instead of being made with a design that the user could outgrow, Yubo has an area on the lids to insert graphic panels. Users can go to getyubo.com and order panels or upload a photo and have a custom design created. This creates a lasting lunch box that can also be passed down generations and keep current through the new graphic panels.
Harden says the idea of graphic panels is similar to many sticky ideas, “you are like, ‘wow, it always should have been like that.’”
“It’s fun to use and we are watching families pack their lunch together now and kids taking a higher interest in what they are eating,” he says.
“We are really trying to build on the experience of consuming a lunch, it’s not about the box itself, it’s about the mobile food experience and to be transcendent in design to me is really what it’s all about.”
Whipsaw, a San Jose-based industrial design and product development firm, has created a variety of breakthroughs in different categories including a baby bottle shaped like a breast and computers that look high-performing and fast. Fast Company magazine has named Whipsaw one of the top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Design.
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