This Studio Notes letter is about choosing recyclable packaging for our pockets and what the Pringles tube taught us along the way.

1.   THE  FEEL OF IT

When I was a graphic design student in South Africa, I spent a holiday "helping" at my sister's design studio. I doubt I was much help. It was a tiny packaging studio, just my sister and her boss, and the artwork was airbrushed by hand by a professional artist. I'd been taught to airbrush myself, but watching someone who could actually do it was the best part of the holiday.

Almost all of that is digital now, and I miss it. Airbrushing is slow and physical. The paint has a life of its own, leaving tiny flecks and imperfections a screen never quite captures. You have to work with it, adjusting your hand and pressure as the image takes shape. You can't rush it, and you notice every little thing.

Packaging has come and gone in my work ever since, but I've never looked at as much of it as I have in the last few months. We've walked trade shows and gone looking in places that have nothing to do with travel and commuting. Perfume sample cards, tissue paper, swing tags. When you're trying to solve a small problem, it helps to look at how somebody in a completely different industry has solved theirs.

For months, every parcel we've received has been opened and inspected twice. Once to see how it felt, and again at the bin to see what it left behind.

We'd decided early on that anything single-use had to be recyclable.

How hard can that be? Apparently, very hard.

2.  BURIED IN HIS BEST WORK

As we always do when we start on something new, we looked at the people who'd done it before us. In packaging, one design kept turning up. The Pringles tube.

Fredric Baur was a chemist at Procter & Gamble. In 1966, he filed a patent for a tube that stacked curved crisps neatly instead of tipping them loose into a bag. Baur was so proud of it that he asked to be buried in one.

In 2008, when he died aged 89, his children stopped at a Walgreens on the way to the funeral home to buy a tube for some of his ashes. His eldest son, Larry, told Time that they'd briefly debated the flavour before deciding it had to be the original. More than forty years after he filed the patent, part of Baur ended up inside his own invention.

It's a wonderful story about a man who loved his work. It's also made me feel slightly awkward every time I look at a Pringles tube now.

The original packaging was a recycling nightmare. A cardboard sleeve was bonded to a foil lining, with a metal base, a plastic cap and a metal tear-off lid. All those different materials made it difficult to separate and sort. In 2017, Britain's recycling trade body named it the country's number-one recycling villain.

The tube has since been redesigned. A version with a paper base instead of steel went on sale in the UK in January 2024, although it still had a plastic lid. It even won a packaging award that year. Yet questions remain about whether the lining means the tube can be recycled in practice.

That surprised me. I'd always assumed something was either recyclable or it wasn't. Now I know there's a difference between a material that can theoretically be recycled and a piece of packaging that can actually make it through the system.

Which brings us back to our own little problem.

3.  RECYCLABLE PACKAGING, AND EVERYTHING THAT GOES ON THE BAG

We've settled on glassine bags for our packaging. If you haven't come across glassine before, it's a thin, translucent paper with a lovely smooth finish. It looks simple, feels good and can be recycled with paper where local facilities accept it.

What we hadn't fully thought through was everything that goes on the bag.

Printing directly onto the glassine would be the neatest solution. One material, no separate label, nothing extra to peel off. Unfortunately, it would mean ordering 10,000 bags in each size.

That's a lot of pockets. We're optimistic, but not quite that optimistic.

So, for launch, each bag gets a paper label. It's a small compromise, but one that lets us order sensible quantities without adding anything that stops it being recycled.

We want a parcel that's a pleasure to open and doesn't leave you standing over the bins trying to work out what goes where. We're happy with where we've landed for now.

One day, if we sell enough pockets to justify 10,000 printed bags in each size, the labels can go. Until then, we'll keep looking.

4.  IN THE STUDIO

It's been packaging all the way this week. We've been working on the labels and the inserts that go into each parcel. There's a small surprise in the inserts, but you'll have to buy a pocket to find out what it is.

In the meantime, if you know a better way to label a paper bag, or you've seen packaging that gets it right, tell us. We'd like to hear about the ones that defeated you, too.

Sioux

These are the good days. We considered a crisp tube. Briefly.