Cats are described as being a lot of things: catty, being one of them, low maintenance, is another. Cats generally take care of their own and have more fun exploring than playing tug-of-war. While cats get along just fine without the frills of marketing or zany toys from the canine aisle, Cat Person, a direct-to-consumer cat lifestyle brand aims to create solutions that improve the quality of their life and bring some curated games of curiosity to the cat’s world of crunchy paper bags and light-up laser toys.

Cat Person provides ‘whole cat care,’ as they call it, which means they’ve considered everything, even giving the shipping containers a second purpose. The team at Cat Person knows that your cat will inevitably find its way to a cardboard box in the recycling corner, so they’ve made their shipping containers convertible into feline-friendly toys. Cat Person looked to industrial design to make further use of cardboard boxes and found transformation possible in corrugated cardboard and seams. Chris Granneberg, a California-based industrial designer, collaborated with Cat Person to seamlessly turn Cat Person’s cardboard shipping boxes into playhouses fit for felines. Since Cat Person is all about strengthening the bond between cat and person, Granneberg knew he had to design the boxes in such a way that fully embraced that bond. Granneberg constructed a second life for Cat Person’s shipping boxes by implementing a similar building method to that of cardboard castles and pop-up storybooks.

The external shape of Cat Person’s shipping boxes was maintained by taking advantage of all the interior space. Granneberg designed three shipping containers for Cat Person, each forming different structures. The first, which contains initial orders for Cat Person customers, is the trial shipper and that transforms into the Paw Puzzler, a custom mailer box with a perforated corrugate tray that transforms into a shorter box dotted with holes large enough for a toy ball and your cat’s paw. The second shipping container is fitted to ship Cat Person’s most frequently bought store items, reshapes into the Cat Chalet, similar to a cardboard castle formation, with elongated dust flaps that nest together to become a peaked roof. The last shipping container is sized for the larger orders and converts into a Cat Condo much like the Cat Chalet, except the Condo’s elongated dust flaps are used to bend and separate the box into two rooms for cats to crawl between.

The creatives at Cat Person reached out to Granneberg in order to ensure that each box was given the proper attention and care needed to turn them into sustainable playgrounds for cats. By giving the shipping containers dual-purpose, Cat Person and Granneberg gave the common cardboard box a second life. If I know anything about cats though, my guess is that these cardboard castles might take on a third life in the form of scratching posts and chew toys, but as long as it’s not the couch.

Designer: Chris Granneberg x Cat Person