Turning Old Boxes Into New Toys (Imagination No Longer Required)

Anyone who’s ever unwrapped presents at Christmas knows how much kids love to play with the packing and boxes, often more than the contents. One company, Box Play for Kids, is taking that one step further by turning throwaway household items into imaginative toys with a series of well-designed stickers.
Egg cartons lying around? Then you also have caterpillars and pianos. Discarded cereal boxes double as record players, while milk cartons are clearly pigs, cows, fire trucks, and choo-choo trains. If old cardboard tubes are your thing, you are in luck. With no assembly required, you can now have a shark, bowling pins, baseball bats, and a dalmatian puppy (that never needs to be walked). That’s a lot of cardboard you can reuse, and a lot fewer disposable toys you can buy.

There’s no age recommendations for Box Play’s stickers (although their motto reads "For Kids"), but they’re presumably designed for--and were more or less conceived of--by children. Box Play’s founders, two designers with decades of experience in package design, branding, and advertising, are raising a girl named Chloe whose fascination with stickers and old boxes sparked the idea.
To make their products as environmentally responsible as possible, all the stickers are made from 100% recycled and uncoated paper, so kids can add their own little personal flair before those boxes get sent back to the trash or recycle bin. You can pick up your own set at their website, or at stores, for about $4 and $12 each.