Appliance carton design: Naturemill

We consider ourselves lucky to have a decent size backyard capable of sustaining plant life. We used to diligently compost our vegetable scraps, but they never fully broke down and in the winter the whole process kind of broke down. No one wanted to trudge out through the snow to the backyard to dump the scraps in the plastic bin—where, rather than becoming compost, they’d just become frozen!

When Russ Cohn from San Francisco-based NatureMill contacted us about package design for his patented line of automatic composters, we couldn’t have been happier. An MIT alumnus, Cohn had invented the device that solved our whole composting problem. (We wanted one.)

The big design challenge of the project was making the bilingual version of the carton design. Canadian market requires that equal emphasis be given to both French and English and, since it was a whole new product concept, the package had a lot of explaining to do.