SAVVY LEADERSHIP ACADEMY
Savvy Leader Academy (SLA) is a local startup company in San Luis Obispo that focuses on developing leadership skills, manners, etiquette, social skills and dance. They currently hold workshops for kids to help them with these skills. The workshops aren’t always accessible to everyone, so Maggie thought of subscription boxes for kids as a way to access more kids. We helped SLA with their packaging for a subscription box service they hope to launch. We designed binder dividers, a board game, playing cards, and stickers featured in the boxes. The activities are aimed for kids to have to work with real people, rather than completing tasks online. The subscription boxes are meant to be fun, engaging, and something the kids look forward to completing each week. We saw these elements from sketches all the way to final prototypes suitable for reproduction on a larger scale.
MY ROLE
My Role - Graphic & Product Designer
Tools - Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, iCut
Teammate - Kelly Wong
Skills - Packaging, die lines, visual design, prototyping, production
PROCESS
Sketches - One of Maggie’s biggest needs was a design for a box. Her idea was to send customers a box in their first shipment and then small work packets to follow. The box itself was something that was holding her back so we tackled this project right away. We wanted to make the packaging not only consistent with her branding, but also something that could be used more than once. We presented Maggie with some sketches of two different design ideas. The first was a box that turned into a backpack. The box would have a piece on the bottom that would peel off and the child would pull out the straps to become a backpack. The second idea was to have a board game printed on the inside of the box. Maggie loved the idea of a board game which could be reused throughout different workshops.
PROCESS
For the box, we printed the outer and inner designs on liner with a sticky back. Then we carefully stuck the outside liner onto a large piece of E-flute. After, with the help of Peter, we squeezed out all the air bubbles between the liner and the E-flute. When we felt satisfied with how the liner looked on the E-flute, we brought it to the Konsberg to cut out our die line and score our folds. Having the registration marks made this process super easy to cut. Once we finished cutting we stuck the inner liner onto the box and used an exacto knife to trim off the excess. For the binders, we printed them on glossy bond paper and laminated them before cutting them on the table.
PROCESS
Continuing off the board game idea, we also turned some of the tasks she used during her sessions into playing cards that would be a part of the game. This was one of the ways we were able to bridge the curriculum into the subscription boxes and have it still be engaging for the kids.
FILE PREP
Designed the box using a standard box size we found on the USPS website. I made the die line based off a prototype I made out of paper. I didn't account for the thickness of the E-flute which caused some issues with our final prototype. The file had an art layer, and a die line layer including registration marks for seamless production with the iCut. The red lines are cut lines while blue lines are for scoring.
PRODUCTION
1. Printing the vinyl with sticky back on the Roland.
PRODUCTION
2. Squeezing out the air bubbles between the vinyl and E-Flute.
PRODUCTION
3. Box about to get cut on the Konsberg.
PRODUCTION
4. The finished box: cut and scored.
DELIVERABLES
CHALLENGES
CHALLENGES
As web and digital media majors, we weren’t very familiar with packaging. We made the box freehand in Illustrator so when we output the final prototype we noticed we didn’t account for the thickness of the substrate. If we were to make the box again we would probably adjust the lid to be smaller so it would fit better when it’s closed. Similarly with the tabs that fold into the box to close it, we would adjust the shape to more easily slide into place. Next time we would try to use packaging software such as Esko that does calculations for substrate thickness and other factors that affect packaging.
FUTURE - We have given Maggie all our files and prototypes. We hope to see Savvy Leadership Academy take on subscription boxes sometime in the future.