Packaging

Aesop's brown glass bottles aren't a style choice. Its plant-based formulas degrade when exposed to ultraviolet light, so the dark amber glass exists purely to block UV. Rather than disguising this functional constraint, Aesop turned it into its signature look.

Bubble wrap was first meant to be wallpaper. In 1957 two engineers sealed air bubbles between two shower curtains as a 3D wall covering, but the look never sold. It also flopped as greenhouse insulation — then in 1960 it found its calling: packaging cushioning.

Chemist Fredric Baur, whose Invention was the iconic Pringles tube Packaging, asked that his ashes be buried in a Pringles can. When he died in 2008, his family stopped at a drugstore on the way to the funeral to buy an original-flavor can and placed his remains inside.