Kris Struble

Chapter I · Product Design

The Insect Spreading Kit

Paxton Gate’s insect-spreading class, packed into a box so people could learn it at home. I designed, costed, illustrated, and built it — then redesigned it once I saw how the first version actually lived on the shelf.

  • Product reasoning
  • Packaging
  • Cost
The Insect Spreading Kit box: kraft label with the Paxton Gate monkey and a list of contents, sides printed with illustrated insects on green
The finished kit, version 2.
~½the cost of version 1’s acrylic box, for printed packaging that looked just as good
2specimens in every kit — a butterfly and a beetle — paid for by the savings
$88on sale at Paxton Gate
Version 1

A clear acrylic box

It showed off the tools beautifully but would scratch with normal handling and it was a large share of the cost of every unit.

Version 2

Printed packaging, and a second specimen

I replaced it with custom printed packaging that looked just as good at about half the cost, and put the savings back into the kit: a second specimen. Now every kit has a butterfly and a beetle, so a beginner practices both techniques instead of one.

Damaged packaging dropped, and the colorful box plus “two chances to learn” pulled more customers in.

Version 2 die-line. Every insect in the pattern is my illustration. The flaps carry the jokes: “Caution: contents may bug your friends.”
Where I held firm

Two specimens, two techniques, in every box. The value of the kit is the learning, so that wasn’t the place to save money.

Where I left room

The box is a pattern, not a portrait of one species. Pairings change with what suppliers have — five of them on the listing today — without reprinting a single box.

Same system, second product

A stack of kraft-paper Owl Pellet Dissection Kit boxes with a black octagonal label, an illustrated owl in flight and a row of small rodent skulls
The Owl Pellet Dissection Kit. I drew the skulls a kid will actually find inside the pellets and put them on the front of the box.
Label print proof, 4 × 8 in trim.
Five shaded ink drawings of bird and rodent skulls with jaws, found in owl pellets
Skull line-up drawn for the label and instruction pamphlet.