Designing gifts for your clients is a unique opportunity to demonstrate the full range of your studio’s creativity – and they make you look pretty generous, too. Sidestepping the tsunami of gifts around Christmas and New Year’s, REACTOR celebrated their 13th year in business last year with this fantastic package of goodies delivered to clients at a most unusual time of year.
“Since we live and breathe the color orange, we give them around Halloween time,” explained REACTOR’s Megan McClure in an email…in orange type, no less. “We tend to think this is a much more effective time of year and allows the work to stand out among the crowd and apart from the holiday chaos.”
What they came up with was a fun and funky assortment of items renowned for their ability to bring the recipient good luck. Inside a package designed to resemble a Chinese takeout box, they placed a fortune cookie (would you believe they found an orange one!) and one of three different lucky items: a rabbit’s foot, four-leaf clover seeds, or a miniature horseshoe. Also included was a more modern good-luck totem: a lottery ticket with a “lucky” penny.
Says Megan, “We wanted to play on the notoriously unlucky aspect of the number 13 by giving the client ‘good luck’ items instead. We hand delivered one fortune box to each client and mailed them to those clients located outside” of Kansas City, Mo., where REACTOR is based.
Aside from the obvious allure of the idea, each item beautifully demonstrates REACTOR’s whimsical-yet-disciplined design sensibility. The takeout box alone is a million miles away from the usual packaging, with the die-cut box wrap elevating it beyond anything you’re accustomed to. While I could easily enthuse over each piece, this is really one of those times when it’s best to let the video do the explaining. I will say that the choice of Arjowiggins’ Curious Metallics (available stateside from Mohawk) gives these pieces a slick, appealing feel.
“As a creative firm, we are selling engaging brands and marketing materials to our clients, so this piece served as an example of the types of products we deliver and the emotional connection we incite for our clients’ customers,” Megan points out. Mission accomplished, I’d say, though I was left with one niggling question: Did any of their clients strike it lucky with those lottery tickets?
“No huge life-changing wins,” Megan admits, “but we’ve had a few clients who won free tickets and added a few dollars to their pockets :)”
