Mushy blueberries, a shower curtain and a dry cleaner.

PackIt is an American brand of foldable, freezable lunch bags and related carriers. Its founder, Melissa Kieling, told the story of its start in her own words in an article for Business News Daily, written as founder and chief executive of PackIt LLC and last updated on 1 February 2018. She wrote that she grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa, where her mother kept a garden and cooked from scratch, and that in 2009 she was raising her children on her own and packing their lunches every day.

The problem, as she described it, was small and specific: the blueberries she packed kept turning mushy by lunchtime. Her question was, “Why hasn’t anyone put freezable gel inside the walls of a bag to keep things cool?” To find out, she cut apart a set of quilted ice packs and a shower curtain, pinned them together and took them to a dry cleaner, who sewed a prototype. She froze it overnight and her children took it to school to test it.

Kieling wrote that she had no background in product design, manufacturing, sourcing factories or importing goods when she began, and that she had to learn each of those as she went. In 2009, she said, she patented the concept and launched PackIt as a foldable, freezable lunch bag. Her advice to others starting out was blunt: “Don’t let inexperience stop you – just take the first step.” She added that her sons, as teenagers, took customer service calls, packed orders and helped with product development.

From one lunch bag to a family of carriers.

The idea at the centre of the brand has stayed the same: the cold is built into the bag itself, so the whole carrier goes into the freezer the night before. Kieling described the product as having freezable gel built into its walls, and the company’s own about page today traces PackIt back to the same story — a mother who wanted to send her children off with lunches that were still cold by lunchtime.

Around that idea the range has grown outward. In her 2018 article Kieling listed bags for wine, picnics, groceries and baby bottles alongside the lunch bag. A trade report on housewareslive.net dated 8 June 2018 said the line had extended in the same directions, credited the brand to Kieling, noted that she had patented the design, and said PackIt’s team was based in California. The company’s current website groups its products into kids’, teen and adult lunch boxes and bags, snack boxes, bento containers, coolers and grocery totes, wine and hosting bags, baby bottle bags and hydration crossbody bags. Product names on the site include the MOD Bento container, the Freezable Crossbody Lunch Box, the Freezable Newport Cooler and a collection called EcoFreeze.

That widening matters to the identity. A brand that began as one lunch bag now has to hold together a family of carriers for very different occasions, from a school day to a picnic, and the word “freezable” in many of its product names is what ties them together. The 2018 housewares report gave the starting point a product name of its own, the Personal Cooler, and dated its launch to 2009, the same year Kieling gives for her patent. Looking back on building the company around it, Kieling wrote that, even as chief executive, she “learned to not be afraid and ask for help.”

Design and documentation.

Lunchbox and food-carrier brands sit at a busy point in the household, between the kitchen counter and the school gate, the office desk or the picnic blanket. Some began with a parent’s own improvised prototype; others grew out of established housewares companies, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to its own website.

A carrier’s identity is usually built less on a logo than on the object itself — its shape, its prints and colours, the way it opens and the name printed on its side — because the product is handled, washed and packed again every day. The companies behind these names may have changed hands, widened their ranges or moved where their products are made since they started.

That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started each brand, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made. Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its manufacturing and the way its packs and prints have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A founder-led company that took its bag abroad.

PackIt has also been sold outside the United States through distributors. The 8 June 2018 housewares report announced that PHA KitchEssentials had been appointed as PackIt’s UK distributor and would show the range at the Exclusively Housewares trade show in London that month. PHA director Paul Hargreaves was quoted as saying, “We’re delighted to add PackIt to our family of innovative North American brands.” The same report introduced the brand to British buyers as one established by Kieling, a mother who had developed the bag herself.

On ownership, the record points to a company that has stayed in private hands. Kieling’s 2018 byline described her as founder and chief executive of PackIt LLC, and a Homepage News report by Peter Giannetti dated 8 December 2023 described PackIt as a private company that develops and markets freezable, on-the-go bag and container products. The company’s own about page states a mission — “We believe that to eat and drink well is to live well”.

The name is a plain instruction, and that plainness suits a product sold on one practical idea. “PackIt” tells a parent what to do with the bag; the word “freezable,” repeated across product names, tells them how it works. The origin story, retold by the company itself, gives the brand a founder and a reason without needing a slogan.

For a design guide, PackIt shows how a brand can rest its identity on a single functional idea and a founder’s origin story, then stretch that idea across a family of carriers without changing its name. Compare Bentgo, another lunchbox brand built around packed meals, and Thermos, the vacuum flask name. For this guide we use ice blue, harbour blue and coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PackIt’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.