
This week PaperSpecsGallery.com presents the Krampus Defense Kit. Little known, but much feared in German-speaking cultures, Krampus is the Yin to Santa’s Yang. While Santa gives gifts during Christmas, Krampus doles out punishment for bad behavior. (Uh oh.) The design team at Swink used this folklore to inspire a very inventive holiday self-promotion, the Krampus Defense Kit.
Click here or on the video below to watch Lenz discuss the Krampus Defense Kit:
From the jingle bells (that keeps Krampus at bay) and non-skid socks (that help you run away) to the burlap bags (your prison if caught) and scissors (your tool for escape from said bag), the kit is full of color and texture. Each element has been carefully chosen to tell the tale of this mythic meanie.
Tactile French Poptone paper, corrugated delivery box, utilitarian typography, clever copy, and manual-styled illustrations, come together to give you the feel of a government-issued survival kit. The creativity even took an interactive bent with a Krampus Detector app for the iPhone.

Sabine Lenz is the founder of PaperSpecs.com, the first online paper database and community specifically designed for paper specifiers.
Growing up in Germany, Sabine started her design career in Frankfurt, before moving to Australia and then the United States. She has worked on design projects ranging from corporate identities to major road shows and product launches. From start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, her list of clients included Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Deutsche Bank, IBM and KPMG.
Seeing designers struggle worldwide to stay current with new papers and paper trends inspired Sabine to create PaperSpecs, an independent and comprehensive Web-based paper database and weekly e-newsletter. She is also a speaker on paper issues and the paper industry. Some refer to her lovingly as the "paper queen" who combines her passion for this wonderful substrate called paper with a hands-on approach to sharing her knowledge.