The Branding of Polaroid, 1957 - 1977

What do we do now?

It's now 1970 and the color stripes are a big hit. They were introduced into supermarkets, then big discount outlets and camera stores, and sales are going through the roof until a recession sets in and someone at the lab decides that Polaroid would sell even more film if it didn't cost so much. The money is in selling film and every square centimeter determines its cost to the consumer.

Bill Field gave me a blank box dummy in the new square format and said, "Maybe we ought to square off the color stripes. See what you can do."

Prototypes – Model 420/490; Type 108 film

The film box, right, and the folding camera model box, below, that was the high end of the product price line. The sleeve held both camera and flash attachment. In my opinion, these cameras – all clones of the original Model 100 – took the very best Polaroid instant color photos.

This is the book, below, that I did using only an off-the-shelf Polaroid camera, so to speak. The cover photo is of my son, who was five years old at the time the photo was taken. Peter Wensberg had said one day at lunch that he would spend a million dollars to get customers to take the camera off the shelf in their hall closets and shoot a couple of rolls of film. Remembering those wonderful books in the Kodak libraries available at most camera stores, I proposed doing a similar program for Polaroid. The concept was that they be sold as products, similar to what Eastman Kodak did, and the cost be self-liquidated, if I can remember the buzz word. Wensberg was elated at the results when I brought in the photos, dummy and script. Calderwood was equally enthusiastic.

Sounds good, but the euphoria didn't last. Wensberg's assistant, Ted Voss, insisted that the customers would be best served if the book was given away as a premium. I argued against that concept but to no avail. At that point, Stan Calderwood had already decided to leave Polaroid, Wensberg was busy preparing to take over Stan's job, and the entire book project just died on the vine. More's the pity because I sold a trade book edition to Doubleday anticipating some promotional effort by Polaroid which never materialized.

A larger family of Polaroid cameras, accessories, and film product image by PG from the 1960s

I'm sorry but this is another small scan from a 35mm Kodachrome. It shows the aforementioned Colorpack camera boxes along with their more expensive folding camera brethren and related accessories.

Polaroid Colorpack Family – Product Image by PG

I wish I had something better than a 35mm slide of this, but that's the way we showed our work in the 1960s and 1970s, with Kodak Carousel Projectors. Below the film boxes is the family of one-piece molded plastic cameras that saturated the market for inexpensive photo equipment. The package design was deliberate. We wanted our retailers to stack pyramids of product and create a Polaroid island to attract instore traffic. The designs were also very visible in store windows throughout Western Europe. The silhouette drawing of the camera identified each model instantly, since the camera model names were not descriptive.

Polaroid’s famous color stripes and how they came to be, 1968

The first color striped package design was created specifically when Polaroid color film was introduced into supermarkets in 1968. Peter Wensberg, ad vice president at the time, insisted on a strong colorful box that would appeal to shoppers as well as look good in television advertising, now being transimitted in color.

[This is also the introduction of the Polaroid Colorpack, a one-piece plastic camera at low end pricing that offered instant color photos. The Colorpack was the brain child of Stan Calderwood, who was now Executive Vice President of Polaroid Corporation. He shared this exalted role with William McCune, whose background was in engineering, and who beat out Stan for the role of President when Edwin H. Land stepped down as CEO. This event will take place in the not too distant future.]

I remember that there was a good deal of pressure for a film package with a four-color process photo of something on it. Wensberg, his assistant Ted Voss, Design Director Bill Field and I discussed it and I can remember being relieved to find that both Bill and I were of a mind to avoid the pretty picture. It was hardly a unique solution and could be done better by others (read Kodak here inasmuch as they were committed to producing instant film) and since Polaroid would not add to the shop cost of the products by upgrading the quality of packaging board and print production. I also created a way of illustrating the product on end panels that would not suffer from the limitations imposed by the printing process of flexography. I'll show examples of these illustrations in subsequent postings.

It’s not possible to describe a step-by-step scenario that led to the final design. Bill and I just kept trying to find something that would please us enough for him to bring into a meeting with Wensberg and Calderwood. I had already been thinking of color and design as a corporate and/or product flag, as I did for Polaroid Sunglasses, for instant recognition by consumers at point-of-purchase where they might have only a fraction of a second to fall in love at first sight -- in a manner of speaking, to be sure.

I began with blank folding box dummies supplied by Champion Paper Box, who was Polaroid’s longtime supplier. When I had something I thought still looked good the next morning, I brought it up to Cambridge for an informal evaluation. With Bill that took all of a couple of minutes because he was a quick study and decisive. Eventually we settled on six color stripes for Polacolor film and Colorpack camera boxes, and seven gradations of black ink for black-and-white film. These packages will be shown in the next post.

We added another color stripe or band for the cover design of the 1969 annual report which is shown here. .