Timber Outdoors (Student Project)

Designed by Matt Erickson
Country: United States

Timber Outdoors is all about providing products that enhance your experience with nature. In order to more successfully reach the target market, a lot of research had to go into the design of the branding as well as the construction of the package itself.

I first put together a competitive audit to find out as much as I could about the industry. Through this, I learned that overall, most of the competition has a very similar aesthetic and very plain shelf presence. In addition, most brands use a lot of unnecessary materials in their packaging with lots of plastic. Some products are very small but are still in entirely enclosed and heavy packages made out of plastic or coated cardboard. For a product area that interacts so closely with nature, there is definitely a lot of room for improvement. I pushed Timber Outdoors in a new direction by creating a more impactful shelf presence and drastically cutting down the amount of materials used for each package.

The second major issue with the industry that I found from my research was that there is a ton of waste involved in the competition’s packaging. Once the object is purchased, there is nothing to do with the packaging besides throw it away. This made me realize the necessity for a secondary use for the materials containing the camping gear.

Continuing my research, I realized that this problem had a surprisingly easy solution. Fire is an important part of basically any camper’s outdoor experience. On top of that, many people have issues lighting a fire (mostly those who weren’t Boy Scouts). Rather than producing a bunch of trash, why not just make it so that the waste can be turned into a fire starter? I decided to actually include matches and a match pad so that not only will the packaging not go to waste, it will make lighting a fire easier for the consumer as well. Two birds with one stone.