I’m a little late to the game, but I think Samsung’s Upcycle TV packaging is a smart innovation more companies should copy. That being said, there are a few tweaks that could make it even easier to understand and build these fun projects.
Samsung’s packaging uses cardboard with minimal dyes and covers the front and back of the box with an expansive grid of dots. Then you can scan a QR code on the box, and from there it takes you to a website where you can learn to cut up and rebuild the box into a variety of things.
For instance, with a large box you can make over twenty things, and I think with a big enough TV, you can likely make multiple objects. This includes Pet Stairs, a smartphone scanning stand and lots of others.
Is it easy to build?
Hell no! After I bought my TV, I scanned the QR code on the box, thinking it would lead me to unboxing instructions, but instead, it showed me the upcycling website, and in particular, that you could make a little cat house, which is really what pulled me in.
So, after a day or two with the TV, I found some free time to pull out the giant box and get to work. I only had an hour, and I was just able to trace out two of the eight pieces of the cat house. A day later, my partner Alex traced out another two, and then I did the final four a couple of days after that. All together, this was probably about three hours of work. Samsung said the entire house could be built in 180 minutes on its website, but you would need to be working with the speed, precision and confidence of a master craftsman to hit that time trial.
The instructions said to place half the pieces on one side of the box and half on the other, but I was able to fit every single one on the front of my box. For some reason, Samsung makes you select the exact type and size of TV you bought before it shows you what designs will fit on that box, but if it’s not going to make the most of the space, I feel like there could be fewer options to pick from in the startup screen. For instance, I could have made two cat houses with the size of a 77-inch TV box.
For the life of me, I don’t know why parts 3,4,5 and 6 aren’t right next to each other to eliminate some lines and cutting.
I get what Samsung is trying to do with the dots, and it does make things dead simple, but just giving simple measurements would mean that if you had a long ruler, you could move faster. There were moments when I was counting out 96 dots for the third time when I truly wanted to give up.
Four parts are all the same height, and it would have been helpful for Samsung’s instructions to place them directly beside each other so that inserting the dividing lines would have been easier, and in the end, there would have been fewer cuts. Had I known how tedious this would have been, I would have spent more time at the start re-planning the layout of the pieces and calculating actual measurements.
Cutting out the shapes was another beast. This was probably another two and a half hours of me trying my best to cut long straight lines with a box cutter. This seemed like it would be fun, but the box I used was super thick, so I needed to put a ton of force on the blade to cut all the way through. During the ordeal, I snapped off three blades just to make sure I was always working with the sharpest knife possible.
I would recommend a comfy box cutter with a good handle or thick gloves if you do this at home. I was using an old hand-me-down model from my grandpa, and it was killing my hand. The plus side of the thick box is that the side you’re not cutting is thick enough to protect your floor.
Since the cardboard is so hard to cut, you need to pull the blade you’re using instead of pushing it. This means a lot of time on all fours rotating around your pieces to cut them all out. I’m pretty young, but after an hour or so on my knees, I needed to pull out a cushion. The front and back of the house, in particular, with all the little angles, were extremely tedious to cut out.
Once I had all my pieces cut out, it was fairly easy to slot them all together, and the little house came together nicely. Because it was so hard to cut out, I have a lot fewer straight lines than I was hoping for, but it all more or less fits together with a little force. Another reason measurements would have been helpful is that they’d give you a quick way to double-check your blueprints before you cut them out. One of my pieces was a single dot too short, and while it didn’t make a difference when putting it together, it would have been nice to be able to verify I had drawn all the lines correctly without having to count to 96 eight more times.
Would I do this again? I’m not sure
There’s part of me that thinks if I have to cut up the cardboard anyway to take out to the curb, it’s more fun to make things out of it. But after doing it and spending so much time on my hands and knees, I’m not sure I’d do it again.
For one, I’m not sure if my cat will even love the house. He’s only gone in it once when I put in some treats the first night I built it. Secondly, there isn’t much I’d want from the list of things to build. That said, for kids, I think that this would be an awesome time sink and a fun project if they’re old enough to handle a knife competently.
You can see what devices come with upcycled boxes on Samsung’s website. Hopefully, the company will soon add real measurements to the website so anyone with any box can take advantage of this, but for now, it’s Samsung only.
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