“Cardboard Chaos” videos approach 1 million views with Tony Hawk collaboration

Tim Wilson, President of Ernest Packaging Solutions states, “As a way to stimulate innovation, we challenged our Design Specialist Team to design unexpected products and push the limits of packaging materials. Our first challenge was a Paper Snowboard for the Signal snowboard team sponsored by Toyota. After a lot of experimentation we finalized a design worthy of the team to take up to the slopes. We created a video showing the Paper Snowboard in action and released it across our social media communities. Almost immediately we set a new record for Ernest video content and by the end of the first week the Paper Snowboard video was viewed over 100,000 times.”

Mike Martinez, the Director of Consulting Services at Ernest was very excited about the next challenge—building a Paper Surfboard. Mike used a honeycomb structure from Hexacomb, which allowed him to replicate a traditional foam core out of paper, but it was not easy. “There were a ton of disasters!” he said. “It felt like fail after fail after fail.” After many tries and help from Jeff “Doc” Lausch and Future Fins, Mike had the perfect board and could not wait to hit the beach. The Paper Surfboard was coated in fiberglass and worked perfectly, as you can see in the video we’re sharing with you. “Our culture really doesn’t give up,” Mike said. “This is a microcosm for how we approach our business. If there is a problem that needs to be solved, we’re going to find a way.” The video was a huge success, garnering over 200,000 views.

As the next challenge, Ernest started to work on a Paper Skateboard and that’s when a little magic happened. It turns out that an Ernest employee had a connection to Tony Hawk, arguably the most visible and commercially successful skateboarder of all time. When Tony Hawk saw the Cardboard Chaos series he immediately agreed to ride the Paper Skateboard. After a lot of experimentation the board was ready and the Ernest team headed to House of Hawk where Tony tested the paper creation through his street course and half pipe. The board survived the rigor of a skateboard legend and we captured it on video. With a little help from Tony’s tweets, Instagram posts and outreach to Ernest’s social community, the video surpassed over 250,000 views in its first month, breaking all previous Cardboard Chaos viewership records.

We can’t be more delighted that our work with Ernest led to an idea that has been such a home run for the company. We pushed the limits on a concept and had a client willing to be different and now we have a series with a long tail vision for future projects. The increased awareness that Ernest is achieving in the B2B packaging industry is unparalleled. And, from a branding perspective it is wonderful to see the company’s tagline “Moving Packaging Forward” come to life in such a dynamic and fun way.

Scott Gardner, CEO of Liquid Agency

The Ernest Cardboard Chaos video series has also caught the attention of traditional media. CBS News did a piece on the company during sweeps week, and “Outrageous Acts of Science” series on the Discovery Channel is planning to use the Cardboard Chaos content in an upcoming national show. To date the four Cardboard Chaos videos have been viewed close to 1 million times which isn’t too shabby for a B2B industrial products distributor. Next up in the series an interesting product approach in the music industry. Stay tuned!

Take a look at the Cardboard Chaos videos here.