Tea Box – Design

Last year I was asked to design a box for a tea shop here in Tokyo. The idea was to create a design with divided compartments inside for housing the many different spices used to make chai. The shop wanted me to produce the boxes in batches of 50 or so, which is mass production for my small operation, for their customers to purchase. Ultimately I wasn’t able to meet their budget so the project didn’t go forward, but it still proved to be an interesting design challenge that I thought would be worthy to share here. I did however end up making a special tea box for the shops owner, and the design for that box was a direct result of the work done on the following box designs.

The initial design parameters were quite simple:

• Inner compartments divided into four small and two large spaces
• Overall dimensions approx. 200 long x 110 wide x 50 tall

From those criteria my own list of design requirements developed into this:

• Keeping the price as low as possible, which ultimately meant finding an easy to produce design.
• Given the relatively small dimensions of the box I wanted to keep the individual parts thin and light, with sides about 10mm thick, and dividers around 5-6 mm thick.
• I wanted to create a lid that sit directly on top of the inner dividers to prevent the contents from potentially spilling into neighboring compartments.
• Creating a design that would be as durable and long lived as possible

The main box itself and the inner dividers was pretty easy to work out. I planned to do miters on the box, reinforced with glued in keys on the corners, and a floating bottom set into a groove cut into the sides. For the dividers I figured I would simply cut shallow grooves to locate and insert them into the box sides as well as relative to one another.

That said, aside from worrying about easy of production and cost, one of the more challenging aspects to the design was working out how to create a lid that would sit flush on top of the inner compartments. I wanted the lid to sit flush on the top edge of the inner dividers so that in the event that someone roughly handled or shook one of the boxes, the individual spices would stay put in their respective compartments and not spill out into their neighboring spaces.

One of the simplest designs that accomplished that goal used a simple plank style lid that could sit directly on the inner dividers which would be inset into the box. This was ultimately the simplest design overall that I came up with, and the one with the cheapest price attached, but I really don’t like this style of lid because it offers no protection against the top potentially warping or twisting overtime.

Here’s the plank lid design with the lid set in place.

For long term useability and durability I really think frame and panel construction is hard to beat, so my next design featured a frame and panel lid style. But here is where things start to get tricky in terms of using the lid itself to seal off the inner compartments.

One solution was to make a frame and panel lid that overhangs the box sides, allowing the panel itself to fully cover the inner dividers. In the example below I designed a somewhat complicated lid involving a panel that sits proud of the surrounding frame, but the same concept could easily be done with an inset panel housed within a groove running around the center of the lid frame (there’s another example of that style below). But honestly I wanted to do something different than the standard frame and panel design with an inset panel, since it’s quite common and I also don’t like the idea of horizontal surfaces that are inset when it comes to cleaning, dust buildup, etc.

The above design accomplishes the goal of sealing the compartments, but it doesn’t look very elegant to my eye with the lid bulging out at the top.

So here’s a similar style lid, but designed to be flush with the sides of the main box.

I like this style more, but the construction definitely gets a lot more complicated. In order to locate the lid I wanted to use a rabbet cut around the perimeter of the box to fit with a matching cut in the lid frame. From there the floating panel and lid frame needed to be joined with a couple tongues and grooves such that the panel would sit flush with the inner tray. Also to have the lid sit proud of the frame, I needed to use a somewhat thick panel. My approach is certainly not the only solution, and I’ve already thought about some other ways to deal with this box’s particular design challenges, but this seemed to make the most sense to me at the time.

Finally one last lid design that I considered was the following, with a panel that slides out from a groove cut around the perimeter of the box. I’ve seen boxes like this here in Japan, and I like this style a lot. It’s also a pretty easy design to fabricate. My main complaint with this style is the inset nature of the lid, which I don’t always find appealing, but other than that, it’s a pretty simple and effective way to close off a box. And when it’s done well with tight seams, you can really confuse a person as to how to actually open the thing.

As I said in the beginning, I couldn’t find a way to bring the cost down enough to meet the clients budget, using any of these designs. Boxes are tricky, despite their simple appearance. Fabricating the many parts and fine tuning details can really suck up a lot of time… and money. Even if I produced the boxes in multiples to make production more efficient, I figured it would still take about 6-8 hrs per box and that’s bordering on wishful thinking. Including labor, materials and overhead, and a touch of profit, even a seemingly simple box starts to get pretty pricey.

Anyways I did end up designing and building a slightly larger and more complex box for the same client, but for more personal use. The design of this box was very similar but slightly larger and with multiple layers to house more varieties of tea and spices.

For that project the initial design looked something like this. Essentially there are three boxes, with built in dividers, and the boxes themselves nest and stack. I also designed this one with a simple inset frame and panel lid.

Here’s a look at the interior.

The next iteration of this design involved simplifying things by building one box, with two removeable inner trays.

Here’s the same design with the trays put in place.

And again the same design with the lid in place. With this design I shifted back to a frame and panel lid with a proud panel.

For the final design, we simply shrunk down the overall height of the box to make it a bit more compact. This is the design that I ultimately ended up building, and the actual specs are shown in the hand drawn dimension drawing pictured earlier.

I’ll share more details on the construction next week. Thanks for visiting.