Lucky Strike Tobacco Box
notes: label: Description
content: In 1939, Walter Landor arrived in the United States to help install the British training pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. At twenty-six years old, Landor had left his home in Germany to study art and design in Britain, where he became the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of Industrial Artists. With whispers of war circulating around Europe, Landor decided to stay in the United States and travelled to the West Coast in search of design work. In 1941, Landor and his new wife Josephine Martinelli founded Walter Landor and Associates (today Landor) in their San Francisco apartment. The company specialized in packaging and label design for a number of iconic brands ranging from Marlboro cigarettes to Aunt Jemima to Sara Lee. As the company expanded, Landor’s base of operations moved from his home through several locations until it settled in 1962 on the Klamath, a docked ferryboat in the San Francisco Bay that would become an iconic part of Landor’s own brand.
label: Description
content: R.A. Patterson created the Lucky Strike brand in the United States in 1871 as chewing tobacco, however the brand’s later fame came under the American Tobacco Company as cigarettes. By the 1920s, the American Tobacco Company advertised Lucky Strike cigarettes to women as a path to thinness, with the marketing slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” The brand’s marketing focused heavily on the quality of the tobacco, implying that it led to a better-tasting cigarette.
label: Description
content: Lucky Strike’s packaging changed radically during World War II, with the signature green and gold packaging replaced with white and the slogan “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war.” The war effort required the chemicals used to color the packages and thus made them unavailable for commercial use. However, the company also believed that the white packaging would make the cigarettes more attractive to female consumers, who made up a significant percentage of the cigarette market.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Consumer Culture
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Virgil L. Johnson
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1998.0225.18
label: accession number
content: 1998.0225
label: catalog number
content: 1998.0225.18
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Tobacco Box
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 11.5 cm x 5.5 cm x 2.5 cm; 4 1/2 in x 2 3/16 in x in