Paradox Packaging: When Design Turns Meaning Upside Down

I was seven years old when I first I saw Garbage Can Candy. It jumped off the shelf, a riot of pink, green, blue, and purple tiny garbage cans filled with candy shaped like trash. Fish bones, old running shoes, dog bones, empty pop bottles; it was garbage you could eat. I felt both confused and delighted: how could candy and garbage belong together? (Adult me: duh.) In the era of Mad Magazine and Wacky Packages, Garbage Can Candy was a joke made just for kids, a tiny act of subversion I could buy for a quarter.

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Looking back, Garbage Can Candy may have been my first encounter with design irony and the thrill of seeing meaning flipped upside down. That same spirit lives on in what some now call “Chaos Packaging,” a term coined by marketing consultant Michael Miraflor in 2024 (and profiled in The Wall Street Journal) to describe products that appear in unexpected forms: tampons in ice-cream tubs, sunscreen in whipped-cream cans, gin in motor-oil tins, even butter-shaped Bluetooth speakers. These juxtapositions work because they disrupt expectations and make people look twice, but the label “chaos” misses the mark. Here’s why.

Design is, by definition, intentional. Every choice—form, colour, material, finish—is made to communicate meaning and provoke response. Because designers understand that packaging carries cultural meaning, they draw on familiar visual, tactile, and structural codes to influence how a product is seen by consumers and positioned in the marketplace. There is no chaos in that process. Instead of “Chaos Packaging,” I propose a better term: Paradox Packaging. It describes an intentional contradiction of meaning that captures both the consumer’s flash of surprise and the brand’s deliberate act of reinvention.

Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message” (Understanding Media - The Extension of Man, 1964) comes to life here. McLuhan believed that form shapes meaning more than content does, and packaging proves his point. Ice-cream pints suggest indulgence and fun. Whipped-cream dispensers signal playfulness and mischief ; motor-oil cans imply strength and grit; a pound of butter conveys richness. By borrowing and subverting these cues, the designers of these products pictured below have created new meaning: sunscreen reads as sexy, menstrual products as approachable, gin as high performance, and speakers as smooth and rich-sounding.

Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal

The Dieline

This isn’t chaos, it’s semiotic strategy; a kind of meta-design where contradiction exposes the power of the form itself. It's a way to defamiliarize the mundane. And when done well, this kind of packaging becomes the billboard, the campaign, the conduit to free publicity and earned media. Many CPG start-ups know first-hand the power of this approach.

My term Paradox Packaging more aptly captures the designer’s intent and the consumer’s curiosity. It reminds us that design is intentional, meaning made visible. It is proof that form is never neutral, and that packaging remains one of the most powerful ways to communicate and create meaning in culture.