COMPANY: Tread Global
ROLE: Lead Industrial Designer
SCOPE: Designing child resistant packaging solutions, help inventors design products, create branding and promotional material

Out of college I worked for Tread Global, a small Denver based product sourcing and development firm. There I became the lead designer and specialized in child resistant packaging for the medical marijuana industry, which was exploding in Colorado. Companies were looking for creative packaging solutions that met stringent safety standards while being appealing, easy to use and representing of their unique brand identity.

Four of my packaging designs ended up getting patented and two of these took the industry by storm, each selling over 20 million units in a year. Designing these required extensive use of rapid prototyping and user testing to ensure that the packages were easy to open by adults, but impossible to open by young children. This was crucial, since after tooling and manufacturing was underway, the packages had to pass standardized child resistant testing, otherwise they would not be able to be sold.

The soda can topper above was the industry standard for making drinks child resistant certified for over a year. I designed the product to be attractive, memorable, and use a little plastic as possible. With the help of Ska Fab, a brewing automation and equipment manufacturer, I made the cap work with automated canning equipment, as well as stack on each other for shipping.

This “leaning jar” packaging solution won Best Packaging Design at ADCANN in 2021. The jar allowed customers to see the the product inside when looking into waist level display cases. For a time, we were the largest producer of green tinted glass because of its popularity.

Patents: US20210403211A1, USD945159S1, USD945161S1, USD1035447S1