The Chicago Brand Museum opened in the South Loop just after Memorial Day. You can find it on the second floor of a long-extinct Cadillac dealership, beside the former homes of the Chicago Defender newspaper and the Illinois Automobile Club, a short stroll from where Chess Records recorded Chuck Berry and Etta James, on a strip of Michigan Avenue once synonymous with Buick, Ford, Studebaker, Oldsmobile, Locomobile and Fiat and still nicknamed Motor Row. It’s culled from the collection of a married couple, Fred Richards and Elisabeth Emory, who own BLACKLION, the luxury gift store on the ground floor that brands its own name cleanly across the facade.
It’s a sleepy stretch of street now.
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The only major brands are blocks away, Starbucks and Papa Johns.
And yet, inside, spread over 5,000 square feet of loft, is a dense, colorful and elegant exhibit of hundreds of years of everyday consumer packaging — logos, boxes, signs, bottles, jars, tins, tubs, grocery store displays, Mr. Peanut in far too many colors to note. The flotsam of marketing, essentially. Something like 15,000 to 20,000 pieces, Richards said, not certain himself. Somehow, it seems more like 200,000. You know how you have acquired so many fridge magnets or concert ticket stubs or pairs of sneakers that someone inevitably jokes that you should open a museum? That’s exactly what this is.
Richards, career advertising designer, professional mad man, winds up and pitches:
“All of this, this museum, it was born from COVID. We were sitting in the house, surrounded by all this packaging I collected. My wife said, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ and I thought, ‘Am I getting divorced?’ She was right, though. A nice way of putting it is that we had achieved a very organized version of hoarding. I had all this stuff, like 30 years of collecting. We decided to catalog and photograph it, one piece at a time. When we got past 5,000 — ‘Houston, we have a problem.’ When we got past 20,000, we stopped counting. There’s more than you see here — we haven’t even gotten to what’s in storage. Bottom line to how much we have? We don’t know how much we have.
“And so, a hobby becomes a collection, which becomes an obsession, which becomes a need for therapy, which becomes a kind of hoarding, which becomes a business opportunity. Though we don’t think of this as business so much as a genuine desire to share what we have with people. A visitor recently broke down here, over peanut butter jars of all things. It connected back to his father, old jars in their garage — he was triggered and cried. But everything in here has a story, because someone kept this or that, didn’t throw it out. There is no reason to have kept a ketchup bottle from the 1950s — we could do an exhibit just on ketchup — yet it was cared for, now it’s here.”
Take those bags of Skittles.
There’s a story there connecting to how Richards and Emory met. A native of Wales, he came to Chicago in 1995 for a wedding; he stayed and worked for design firms. Emory arrived from North Carolina to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Fast forward a bit, they found themselves at competing design firms, handling the same client, Mars Wrigley. A real Nora Ephron romcom. They were tasked with rethinking the Skittles rainbow. In a display case at the museum, there’s an old Skittle wrapper, showing a rainbow that resembles a rainbow, curling downward.
“Changing that was a huge project, yearslong,” Emory said.
“The idea was Skittles are the treat at the end of the rainbow on the package,” Richards said, “but the rainbow is a negative, a frown. So we turned it over and made it a smile.”
“A huge deal,” Emory said. Mars Wrigley “trademarked it globally, and at the time you could not own a rainbow in the confectionary market — there were too many rainbows.”
Whoa, wait: Rainbows are a negative?
“I don’t think consumers were overtly saying that,” Richards said, “but in the global consumer research, you can pull nuance out of negative perceptions. Consumers know why they don’t wear a shirt twice, but they can find it harder in this world to say why they dislike stuff. So packaging alone often can reflect where we are at any moment in time.”
A sprawling array of candy occupies several of the display cases — which veers from M&Ms to Cornish Mint Humbugs, a peppermint-flavored British toffee.
The long, dimly lit gallery is grouped the way, say, a neighborhood Target is grouped. There’s a wall of milk bottles, a ground-coffee display, miles of board games, acres of detergents, an entire shelf dedicated to the packaging of chocolate-covered cherries. There are moth nuggets, moth crystals and, as you know them nowadays, mothballs. There are plastic Tommy guns that marketed Chicago mob history to children in Beijing. There are brands that vanished decades ago, and brands no landfill could be without. There’s a tower of Kellogg’s and Brillo boxes, made by Andy Warhol. Alongside that, stretching the width of the room, is the old wooden table at which Chicago Defender editors once sat and discussed the day’s events. Aside from a museum, Richards and Emory use the space for advertising meetings and workshops.
Evolution, in a consumer-packaging sense, is a recurring theme. There is every iteration of Tide box, including the first in 1947, and every variation of the game Connect Four.
Richards himself designed the most recent version of the Kellogg’s name, and before you can say, hold on, that ubiquitous scripted logo is ancient — yes, but as he shows, minor changes happen incrementally, over decades, font tweaks, lettering adjustments.
“Every category (of consumer goods) has a language, which is one thing we want to get across,” he said. “Cereal boxes — the manufacturing logo goes in the top left-hand corner at a 17-degree angle, the cartoon character is beneath that, below that a bowl and spoon, generally. Detergent is the same — for years it was about how loudly a box screamed. Someone does it first, the rest are copies.”
Characters, though, do change. “See the Coco Krispies monkey? He was an elephant. I’m sure there was a corporate struggle at Kellogg’s over that. Same with Sugar Frosted Flakes: The mascots were ice pixies until someone at (Chicago ad firm) Leo Burnett said, ‘No, a Bengal tiger.’”
There is a learning curve in the nascent days here.
Did you know the “T’s” in Tostitos are eating chips? Or that we have potato chip bags because they once came in tins, holding bags, and customers only wanted the bag? Or that Matchbox car boxes once had faux-striking pads resembling matchbooks?
Since they’ve been open, Emory said, visitors tend to step inside unsure of what to make of a room of packaging. “Unless you live in the world we live in, even the word ‘brand’ is a roadblock for some. They come in, see the things they buy every day, it looks like a room of old stuff at first, then they start to recognize it as individual pieces of art.”
Richards said they’re attempting to generate, in varying degrees, some art appreciation, consumer-marketing knowledge and “a big warm hug of nostalgia.” “We believe this stuff is as important as architecture, fashion, music. … It’s a reflection of behaviors and tastes. There is a narrative inside of this about who we are, and it needs to be explored.”
Why, for instance, does the packaging for Lyle’s Golden Syrup show, on its logo, a dead lion surrounded by a swarm of bees? (Answer: It’s an allusion to the Old Testament.)
A display of champagne packaging from the French company Veuve Clicquot, a wall of orange-yellows, is also a pocket history of female innovation: Its leader, a 20-something widow known as Madame Clicquot, invented the riddling process that transformed typically murky champagne into clear bubbly, defied Napoleonic trade blockades and chose the distinctive label that still identifies Veuve as one of the earliest luxury brands.
This began with Richards — who has designed packaging for Duracell, Old Spice, Swiss Miss, Swarovski, Pepto-Bismol, Starburst, Slim Jim and a million others. He started collecting brand packaging in the 1990s while working on a dog food, eager to create some archive of discontinued branding. He said most everything inside of the boxes in the Chicago Brand Museum — including those from the Victorian Era — holds the object advertised. At first, he and Emory — who worked on Sharpie, Aldi and Juicy Fruit, among others — thought they could partner with a Chicago museum. They sought out several. “And they were incredibly dismissive,” Richards said. “We probably came across as hobbyists. They brushed us off. So we decided to do everything ourselves.”
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They didn’t apply for grants, ask for loans or reach out to corporate investors. They built the museum themselves with their own money — they own the building, which helps. They also don’t want to discuss how much of their money they invested in the museum. But easily a low six figures, Richards said, who added he insured the collection itself for six figures (not including those Warhol pieces). They said it’s all been a 15-year dream.
They are not, however, museum curators.
They have an exhibit of the 1,810 pieces of trash they collected from their own household, one year’s worth, a nod to environmental issues raised by a room full of disposable packaging. But they acknowledge, at the moment, there isn’t room for a traditional museum. Richards himself is available for tours, but without him, it would be hard to register many of the conventional details we’re used to getting in museums — like dates, the lineage of objects, the names of who exactly created what. Emory said they recognized early on that they didn’t have the room to “tell individual stories, spread it out or give different brands their own stories.” They know they could have exhibits on Chicago-bred brands, for example. But they acknowledge they might have to move out of the South Loop to do it, and they would prefer to stay. (They live in nearby Bronzeville.)
What they’re hoping, at least for now, is a good start.
A compelling case that a museum like this, in a city known for advertising firms, should exist.
“We see people bewildered when they come in, then overwhelmed,” Richards said. “Then they’re triggered, their minds flood back to grandma’s house, Christmas morning, and they start telling all these personal stories tied to what’s around them. I think a lot about that scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ when (a rival archeologist) is showing Harrison Ford his watch and saying that he bought it on the street for $10. He says it’s worthless, but if he buries it in the sand for a thousand years, it’s priceless. That’s exactly what this is.”
If you go
The Chicago Brand Museum, 2412 S. Michigan Ave., is open Thursday to Sunday; admission $25 at www.thechicagobrandmuseum.com