*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, December 26th, 2013 8:01pm PST - promote requested by lucky760.

Interesting, but...

Firstly as a person who packs things in boxes as part of my job I can't see it saving much time. They're really messing around when showing the side by side use. I'm sure I could pack as quickly using a proper tape gun and a conventional box.

Second, if you think I'm sending a box through any sort of delivery system when it will fall open when pressed in one pace, forget it.

This is one of those things that looks revolutionary and genius if you're not involved in the industry, but in reality it's just not really a big improvement and I can't see many if any companies going for it.

May just end up being something only consumers use, if even that.

I'm not in your industry, but the first thing I noticed is how the "classic" box WASTES less cardboard when being die cut out of the cardboard roll, whereas their box won't fit together with other boxes, leaving huge chunks wasted between them.

I suspect they do it like cutting fabric -- turning the pieces to fit snugly. I'll bet there is less waste than you think.

There is waste -- either in the cutting or in the box itself.

I wonder if shipping costs are affected positively by a smaller box.

I also thought -- boy, if you pack with ghost poop, you don't want that box popping open like that. You'll want to use the airbags instead.

Regardless of whether or not this catches on, it does interest me how many years/decades it takes for intelligent human design to catch up with mass-manufacturing.

Yes if you are trying to send millions of these per day and they open that easily it won't work. They pile those boxes on top of each other. As a consumer I'm happy that they *are* hard to open particularly as you know they're being thrown about.

The assumption you're making is that these kids are the first people to look at changing packaging when they're not. There are some unbelievably clever card packing solutions out there. Just go and buy a large format HP printer and marvel at the way the box fits every component perfectly, its a real work of art. Rather than a simple box packed with polystyrene packaging they use almost exclusively cleverly folded card inserts and boxes to pack their stuff.

That's fine for very precise requirements but for general packing there's a simplicity to a cardboard box that's very useful. They're dead cheap to make, the material cost is tiny so any savings there really aren't going to be great.

It's the universalness of the product that makes it so useful. Everyone knows what to do with a box, and even if you'd never seen on before you could pretty quickly work out what to do. This clever solution they've found in this video is missing that bit. You'd need to print instructions or train people how to use it and then all your economy is gone.

It's a big industry and the box makers have very clever box designers already working for them and already doing incredibly clever things for lots of very large companies. There's no catching up to be done. The only difference between these kids and the real box designers is that the kids have a youtube video to impress people who aren't in the industry.

aren't we already at diminishing returns when it comes to paper-based things?

we can already recycle paper/cardboard pretty well right?. Just the fact that we're using paper instead of some sort of plastic is better on the environment.

then you gotta expend more resources building those templates that made the packing look so easy. so all that "saved" resources is now going to make box templates.

just seems like their efforts would be better spent on other fields. Obviously we need better recycling technology, but don't we have the paper recycling situation pretty much dealt with other than just getting more consumers to recycle their papers/cardboard

I once worked at goods in/out at a bookstore and boxes are a big thing as you can imagine.

Even if i fork out the money for a cast, i'm not going to fork out for a whole range of differently sized casts just so i can pack things larger or smaller than a small cube. How many casts am i supposed to own and do they fit inside each other like matryoshka dolls?

We kept any decent boxes that arrived in order to re-use them sending things back out again, and the rest we recycled. The best thing about a box is that it doesn't need pristine crisp corners and edges to be reusable, i feel like this contraption will make boxes less recyclable overall.

Based on all these comments, I'm thinking I should add the tag "fail" to this vid.

Still and all, it is a cool thing, even if not practical.