(Two famous egg-shaped, plastic packages.)
Silly Putty: invented around 1943—(either by Dow Corning’s engineers or by inventors working for General Electric)—but ultimately marketed and sold as “Silly Putty” in the early 1950s by Peter Hodgson. Originally called “Nutty Putty” and “Bouncing Putty,” Hodgson changed the name to “Silly Putty.”
As Easter was fast approaching, Hodgson decided to package 1-ounce chunks of putty into plastic eggs and he sold them for $1.
In February of 1950, Hodgson introduced Silly Putty at the International Toy Fair In New York. The other toy marketers saw little use for Hodgson’s Silly Putty and encouraged him to abandon his plans to promote it. Without any regard to their discouraging comments, Hodgson brought the Silly Putty production to a converted barn in North Branford, CT. He continued to package the Silly Putty in plastic eggs and these were shipped to toy stores in pasteboard egg crates that he acquired from the Connecticut Cooperative Poultry Association. Although this was an innovative idea, it didn’t catch on as Hodgson had hoped, until he got some help from an unexpected ally. That August the writer for the Talk of the Town section of “The New Yorker” magazine wrote an article about Silly Putty after he had discovered it in a bookstore. Hodgson shortly thereafter received orders for over a quarter million eggs of Silly Putty within just three days time.
–Retro Planet
(So while it was in no way an “Easter” product, it turns out that Silly Putty was packaged in eggs—which were, themselves, packaged in egg cartons—on account of Easter.)
L’eggs: The other well-known example of egg-shaped packaging is from the 1970s.
The L’eggs naming, package and logo were created by designer Roger Ferriter, working in the design studio of Herb Lubalin Associates in New York City in 1969. On the morning of the scheduled presentation to the Hanes Corporation of the marketing and packaging ideas for the new low cost pantyhose launch, Ferriter was not satisfied that the work was sufficiently creative. In an effort to revisit the name and packaging one last time, he attempted to “experience” the product in some new way, hoping that the exercise would suggest a new creative direction for the branding. Among his efforts, he attempted to compress a pair of pantyhose in his fist, wondering how compact the product could become. Staring at his clenched fist with the pantyhose inside he was struck with the possibility that the package could be an egg. Just as quickly, he realized that egg rhymes with leg, and then adding the popular mid century marketing boost of giving a product name some French sounding twist, he incorporated the l’ (French for “the” when followed by a vowel such as the “e” of eggs) and arrived at L’eggs. Some sketches were prepared in time for the presentation, including a logo that incorporated two egg-influenced letter “g”s and thus was born one of the most successful product launches in history.
Wikipedia’s entry on “L’eggs”
(In 1991 L’eggs switched from their plastic, egg-shaped container to a (vaguely) egg-shaped paperboard carton.)
Even though “the egg” is one of those oft-cited examples of nature’s perfect packaging, the egg-shaped plastic containers of both companies always required additional packaging and were sometimes even put into boxes.
(Boxes and more L’eggs, after the fold...)
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