Beautiful Kite Packaging Art

If you are ever in a beach town, one place you should always stop is the local pharmacy. Better yet, if they have one, a Five and Ten store. They are filled with wondrous beach-related items, which are sometimes available outside of that world, but usually not in such numbers. Recently I was lucky enough to visit a small town and spied a Five and Ten and was not disappointed with what I found. Innumerable cheap plastic toys and games, plus a kite section as dense as a breakfast cereal aisle. While looking at these kites, I started to fixate on the kite packaging art.

A lot of this work reminds me of the packaging on fireworks. Which is another type of packaging that I have always adored. Something I also tend to look for or associate with beach towns. Or, as we say in New Jersey, Shore Towns.

It is colorful and creative, so I thought I would snap a few photos and share them here on the site. A lot of these are not technically retro, but I don’t think that kite packaging art changes all that often. If you bought kites as a kid, I think you might have seen a few of these Gayla and Krazy Kite packages before.

Beautiful stuff right? Besides the apparent timelessness of the style, what really pleases me about this art, is that it is just being made at all. Somewhere, a company exists that needs to sell colorful kites. They have artists, who they pay money to create delightfully colorful kites, and then perhaps another person who is designing the label to help sell that kite. Each of these kites is nearly identical in style, so the only selling point is the design.

If I met one of these designers, I would have so many questions. How often do they release a new kite? What is the design process like? Do they try to fight the trends? If you work at Gayla, or Krazy, can you go in and pitch a new kite concept? What do those presentations look like?