It's absolutely beautiful, and here's what could have been: the amazing packaging for TopTV's decoder box. It really exists - but only as a concept design piece that On Digital Media (ODM) ultimately rejected and which never became a commercial reality.
Kate Butcher from Cape Town designed this remarkable and beautiful box design for TopTV which the agency at the time, Network BBDO Cape Town (now BBDO 140) then presented to TopTV.
This TopTV decoder box is actually a transparent plastic Perspex box with the TopTV decoder inside and is wrapped and folded in a South Africa flag that's actually done in the TopTV rainbow colours.
If a buyer opened the box, they would see the TopTV ''manifesto'' with the whole design and ''opening experience'' that would create a feeling within the new TopTV subscriber that they're now going to ''access a new world of entertainment through TopTV''. The subscriber gets a TopTV flag to keep.
TopTV tells me that the pay TV operator agrees that the design is very beautiful, but says that the concept was ultimately rejected because it proved too expensive. ''Unfortunately the costs to produce the box were way too high so we had to shelve the design.''
