Egg tray package Design Story

Samsung Egg Tray is a printer toner package designed to be robust,
eco-friendly, and easy-to-use.

A package's design plays a variety of roles such as protecting its contents during shipping or serving as an advertisement for the product. Because toner supplies serve a specific purpose, any unnecessary protective materials in the packages can burden consumers.
How is it possible to reduce the size of existing toner packages? Is there a way to replace protective materials that are immediately discarded after opening into an environmentally friendly way? Samsung began to design the Egg Tray printer toner package in response to these questions.

Generally, toner packages are comprised of several elements such as a box, plastic foam, air cushion, manual, and product warranty. However, the Egg Tray package only features 2 components: the 'Info-cover', which explains the details of the product, and the 'Unit-box', containing the toner. These two components create a design that the consumer can easily operate. All you have to do is push to open the package, take out the product, and you're done.

While conventional toner packages are comprised of at least 4 different kinds of materials, the Egg Tray package only uses paper products. By just using paper instead of a variety of different materials, production cost for the manufacturer is reduced, and the product becomes simpler to use for the consumer. In fact, the production method incorporates a pulp molding technique that forms products using recycled carboard, paper, and rice straw. This simple technique is not only suitable for the new package design concept, but it is also 100% recyclable, adding eco-friendly values.

Often the instruction manual and warranty information become crushed by the toner if it is put in the package, and as a result, consumers never seem to pay attention to important information about the product. However, such documents are no longer needed for the Egg Tray package, as the information you need is on the cover. After the toner is removed, you can tear the two wings off of the cover to keep the information and warranty cards. What's more, all documents are printed with soy ink to make it recyclable.

We designed the Unit-box by studying the science behind egg cartons. The key was to create a design that could protect what was inside, as would an egg carton, without the help of additional materials such as plastic foam.

Dozens of experiments were held to come up with a final
Unit-box providing the functions of an egg carton.

Another major design challenge was deter-mining the way how the lid of the package would connect to the body. Egg cartons usually have a hinge to connect the lid with the body, but this was not possible for our product. The size and weight of the Unit-box that would hold the toner would be too heavy for the hinge, making it weak. After numerous tests we separated the top of the box from the lid using a unique wing structure. The wing's design also acts as a lock that keeps the package closed even when it is held upside down.

A simplified design, incorporating the Unit-box and Info-cover increased the usability
while the recycled materials and production techniques raised efficiency.
In other words Samsung designers not only considered the needs of the consumers
but also the role of the printer toner package when creating the Egg Tray package.