Designing a Bottle
blog.soylent.com
blog.soylent.com
"Just don't make it a bag and have the consumer have to squeeze it" - c.f. Juicero
But it would t make a nice blog post of be as distinctive brandwise
It also makes for much more compact trash as you can fold and reseal them almost completely flat. Plastic bottles can be "compressed" but they still waste significant space
Isn't part of their marketing greeness? But their model is keurig-for-calories? They _could_ refuse to do the plastic bottles and ship paper bags of powder...
It's a simple, self-contained way to freshly and quickly brew a single cup of coffee with no mess, and priced for consumers: Cutting a few annoying chores out of a rushed morning at a cost of a few tens of cents per cup.
In what world was that ever a hard sell?
It shouldn't be too much harder to add "pods" (powder containers) to that device. It might even make the process easier because the machine wouldn't have to measure the right amount.
[1] http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/carbios-opaque-pet-mil...
1. Paper packaging is much more fragile than plastic packaging. Boxes permanently dent, buckle when compressed, tear much more easily, etc, when enduring punishment that a plastic container will shrug off. Paper is also much less resistant to water damage. Paper-packaged products like milk cartons or juice boxes are usually transported in durable, rigid-walled crates, and would probably do much worse than the previous plastic bottle in a regular door-delivery use-case.
2. I've always found the relatively low rigidity of the whole assemblage to make sipping directly from a TetraPak sort-of-thing a little slippery and uneasy. The box can warp in all sorts of ways. Maybe I've just been burned by spilling milk on my shirt late at night trying to drink from the carton...
3. Bag-in-box specifically doesn't "scale down" to single servings that well. The experience of drinking out of a bladder within a larger box is less-than-ideal because the bladder can slosh around inside the container. Maybe if they aimed to sell bulk wet Soylent fluid, bag-in-box would be the way to go.
A few years ago I took a two week river trip with a buddy. We bought three boxes of wine.
We nixed the boxes, and the wine bladders were just strapped to to raft with all our other stuff.
At the end of the trip, we we both surprised how much abuse those bags went through, and not even a small leak.
Now--the raft was another story.
Soylent is an enterprise and they want to make themselves to look as good as possible in order to generate more revenue. No reason not to criticize awkward marketing blog posts like this.
The juice bottles from "The Martian" movie are the epitome of consumer product design for me:
https://media1.giphy.com/media/11bglU5OG7SJAk/giphy-facebook...
(I apologize for the crappy image; I'm nowhere near a copy of the movie to make a decent screenshot)
No bullshit. Just the product name and necessary information about its content. No useless colors, no pictures of animals, smiling faces or other crap. There are days I dream of starting a food company just to make food in such packaging.
http://www.wowfreestuff.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Inn...
https://www.thewrendesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vit...
Tesco's old Value range was also pretty good for telling you immediately what's in it: http://www.s4rb.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Old_Tesco_Val...
Lastly, we did our best to follow the “less but better” teachings of 1960’s Braun designs. These enduring designs are known for their stripped down features and clean lines. No unnecessary buttons or extraneous curves, just what you need; everything in its place.
It's a bottle. There's no need to evoke Braun or their “less but better” approach, it's always just been a vessel and some sort of cap.
If you want to say "It's marketing" no shit, anything any company publishes ends up going through marketing at some point. Every tech blog a company has is marketing. Who cares?
If you show me a nice program you coded, I'd say "that's cool".
If you show me a nice program you coded and tell me that you've been inspired by John Backus, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, I'd say "yeah well it's still a program".
The "program" here being one of the simplest imaginable, with literally thousands of years of prior art.
To be fair, I often have the same reaction when I see CSS posts on HN.
E.g., this one recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588924
"Inventing a plastic bottle in 2017" - this could be joke, but the ignorance behind it makes me angry.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782/tab-pdf
FYI, the new bottles are a nice improvement. There's no wrapper at the top anymore, which is sometimes annoying to open and creates extra trash, and the shape of the bottle is more space efficient for packaging and storage.
depressing thought
Something about online communications seems to make some people particularly irritable. Perhaps it's the
immediacy and semi-anonymity of it all. Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will soon
think seem to exist to make you miserable.
Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do with a letter received on paper, it's
just so easy to hit your R key and tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them.
Even otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into raving madmen. When this happens,
flames erupt.
[1] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/bdgtti/bdgtti_8.html
> The Pepsi Ratio is created by two simple circles, that are in a set ratio to each other: The Golden Ratio.
> The Pepsi Ratio is aesthetic geometry.
> The Golden Ratio establishes a proportion of one part (a) relative to another (b). Playing by these rules produces an aestetic that is universally accepted to be in balance and harmony. The Pepsi aesthetic respects these rules: The brand identity can be derived from two circles, that have a set relation to each other.
This is a marketing ad, nothing more.
“the same complete nutrition you have come to expect from Soylent”
This is not a joke, I actually feel nauseous because of the name.
Seriously people, the irony levels are too damn high. This is a case of an absolutely atrocious brand decision being made by people whose hubris are blinding them to the fact that they're insulting themselves, and their customers, by associating their product with cannibalism.
I think it all started as a few blog posts about the founder's experiments in creating his own meal replacement, and after he got crazy media attention he decided to turn it into a product.
Soylent as a name is instantly recognizable and has a sense of self-awareness/irony that many other products lack, I would be surprised if the name itself didn't contribute greatly to the initial media coverage.
That said, I'm a customer of theirs, and daft names aren't going to change that.
The company is still called Jimmy Joy. We decided to ask the community what the actual product should be called. Since we already had the 'Twenny Bar' we ended up choosing to name it 'Plenny Shake'
The movie depicts a future in which nourishment has become purely functional -- not by choice, but because food resources are so scarce. (And to top it off, the function is served by the worst "waste" imaginable).
Now, instead of food, the scarce resource seems to have become time.
I understand that Soylent serves a purpose to some, but I believe we should strive to move away from that dystopian nightmare, instead of succumbing to it.
"People are our most important ingredient" (c) some fast food joint, IRL.
I'm inclined to buy it because of the name. I appreciate a company with a good sense of humor.
That, and every time I see a Soylent ad on Facebook, I usually get a good 10+ minutes of amusement from reading the indignant comments about the product's name. To be clear, I have no problem with your stance on the issue; you described your feelings concisely and reasonably. Those FB comments, though....many of them are neither concise nor reasonable.
I think that sometimes, a name that provokes this kind of reaction is a good thing. Maybe it's better to have a product that people either love or hate than for some reason than to have one that everyone is indifferent about.
I'm not saying the bottle design work wasn't better or that the product doesn't benefit from it, but the write-up about it has this sense of self-satisfaction that puts a bad taste in my mouth (completely disconnected from the taste of the actual product which I can't really comment on).
(Paper) cartons are much weaker and less resilient than plastic bottles. Think about the number of times you've seen dented or folded chicken soup cartons on supermarket shelves... I've certainly seen plenty of Safeway soup boxes to avoid because of obvious exterior damage.
I don't think cartons would get them very far in that area.
A few cartons being damaged in the school delivery is fine, but even one damaged in the Soylent delivery means an angry customer.
It's a bit like people go and pay $5 for a cup of coffee in a coffee shop. They are buying the experience more than the coffee.
Slightly OT but for me it's the reverse. If I go to a really good gourmet café then yes it may be expensive and yes, a component of the price is the experience (usually these cafés are nice places to hang out in) but most of it is the coffee itself. I cannot buy a coffee that good for less money in another place, hence I am willing to pay the price they are charging.
I would also think filling and distribution of a carton is a solved problem considering how much milk/juice gets moved in them without too much damage.
"So why sqround? Why not a crisp cornered square bottle, you ask? Obviously, a perfect square would be most efficient in terms of packing. Squares, however, come with their own set of challenges. When bottles travel down the manufacturing line on their way to your door, they are constantly moving from single file to big groups, around curves and corners, and jostling into place. A bunch of round bottles will roll off one another and travel smoothly around corners, but a bunch of square bottles have a tendency to lock up with one another, kind of like a losing game of Tetris. By generously rounding the corners of a square (to the industry-coined “sqround”) we solve these production line issues."
Disclaimer: I drink Soylent's Coffiest every morning.
So what if the result is the same? At least the team behind the work now understands how they got there—and communicate as much to their current or potential fan base.
I wouldn't want to hire a babysitter to watch my child if their sales pitch was: "I've watched a lot of babysitters in movies, I know what I'm doing." It's a bit of a silly comparison of course, but the point remains: how you get to a result is just as important—if not more important—as the result itself. That's good design!
hm...
A team of people spent two years supposedly working on this. That same team could probably have gotten samples from 4-5 manufacturers and selected an Odwalla bottle with a brand design in 2-3 weeks.
It just seems silly and wasteful to me. But hey, it's not my money!
Your comparison can actually be used as a counterpoint to your argument: maybe they should have hired someone who didn't need to look at so many reference designs to figure out sqround.
The first image, second bottle also look "more designed".
a pressurized cylindrical container pushes outward with equal force in all directions. This is crucial for pressurized beverages.
My favorite bottle redesign (http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2010/3/15/ecocoke.html) was done on Coca-Cola and had a similar "sqround" shaped bottle, but I don't think he considered the pressure in the bottle.
He's not thinking of the bottle as a pressure vessel (which it is).
Surely a product's design is meant to give some indication of what is in the product and what the product does?
This just looks like a completely generic bottle and could as easily be for a foodstuff or a cleaning agent.
I saw something similar the other day, a 'brandless' supermarket where everything is designed in a similarly minimalist way. It's infuriating.
http://designtaxi.com/news/394281/A-Fabulous-Brandless-Onlin...
I easily spend as much time worrying about bottle, closures, labels, etc. as I do about the actual product.
Please, it’s a bottle design. Is Soylent trying to create a following like Apple fans? At least Apple makes good products.
Jony Ive is well known to love that look: https://www.google.com/search?q=johnny+ive&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8...
What's the value of sneering at someone else's work like this? Why the mean tone?
(I also have had a bad experience with Soylent)
Can you imagine if the people who marketed shampoos and cleaning products explained how they work in a similar way?
Everyone is trying to create a following like Apple.
Key ingredients:
1. Simple name
2. Simple design with no instructions or "bells and whistles descriptions"
3. Act as if design is 75% of your value proposition
If it isn't obvious, this doesn't always work.