a letter from Starbucks

Hi, We're making a change. Using simpler recipes and taking out artificial ingredients. So your food not only tastes better, it is better. It's a start. But we think it's a good one. Hope you do too. Enjoy.

Your Friends at Starbucks

PS. More to come.

I don't always enjoy lots of copy on my product packaging, but Starbucks has done a nice job handling theirs over the years. And this "letter" of new development is no exception. I think this will do good things for them in the wake of McDonald's offering premium coffees. If Mickey D's ever wrote a letter like this on their packaging, you'll bet they'd earn more media than Monster and Threadless combined.

here comes the packaging...

or actually, there goes the packaging > into the trash. I just cut three large tags (about 2 and a half inches of un-necessary cloth) off some new underwear.

Why do we have tags? And why do they have to be so big (and ugly?). They seem to be the least-evolving characteristic of clothing products and I cut them off when I see them, so what good are they?!

I have bought some clothing over the past year that has chosen to print their label onto the inside of the actual clothing. And if you want to discuss this issue with more people, you can go to the T-shirt Forum. yeah, there's a whole forum to discuss it.

This seems like a new trend in product design but also maybe can be clumped with packaging design. I can't remember where I found it (maybe in Miami) but I bought...let's say some cookies, and each one was individually wrapped inside plastic inside a larger plastic package and then had an outer package that the shopper actually sees > three f'n layers of material to get through Useless! right?

anyway, i'm going to start posting more on packaging. It's something that interests me. I'd be interested to learn about the packaging campaigns that have emerged in direct correlation with their advertising. For starters (and interested readers) here are 13 trends for packaging reported for 2006. How did they do?