Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2013. It is a Christmas 2013 story, and the Bawx prices ($24.99 to $499) and the charities receiving the proceeds are as reported then.
While many parents will have to juggle their budgets to buy their children even a modest present, others face a far worse problem: their kids already have everything, from the latest technology to every kind of toy. So however many options we have for where to buy Christmas presents, choosing one has become far too complicated.
Two creative directors from two advertising agencies have tried to simplify the process by creating a very special gift for kids who already have everything. The gift is a cardboard box, priced from $24.99 to $499. There are four models to choose from, and they are all really the same box: an empty cardboard box. An eco-friendly one, mind you.
The cardboard box, sold under the name “Bawx”, began as an initiative to get these kids to spend more time with their parents and family and less with technology and material things. The Bawx website says that kids would rather spend more time with their friends and parents, to which many have replied that this is a big lie, because kids don’t really want that. “OK, that’s a big lie, but if we give them a Bawx, they’ll spend more time with their people,” came the response.
The profits from selling the boxes will go to several charities, including a leukaemia fund and an association fighting child poverty and abuse.
Both creative directors say they came up with the idea because they have children of their own, and they had been talking about how sad it is that kids are taught materialism from an early age, and how they drift away from their families at an ever younger age. That’s why they decided to set up this company, whose initiative has already been welcomed by many parents keen to teach their children that family matters even more than material things, and that the real Christmas present is family.
Seen on FastCoexist.com. The creative directors work at the agencies TDA Boulder and Barton F. Graf 9000.
Featured image: Creativity103, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
