More than lunch in this box

Hate to leave Laguna Beach? Buy ‘Beach in a Box’ and take the city with you.As the owner of Shamrock Marketing, based in St. Louis, Peggy Ahern worked with Midwestern factories to help them sell their products, but when she relocated to Laguna Beach she found that she couldn’t make a living.

“It was like being a barber in a city where everyone’s bald,” she said, because there are few factories in this area.

“I was walking on the beach thinking, ‘What could I do for a living?’ ... I thought, ‘Why not let people take Laguna Beach home with them to freezing Chicago, or wherever they’re from.”

As a native of Chicago who would come to Laguna to visit family and then have to go back, Ahern could relate to that feeling; with her experience in marketing, she could sell it.

So Ahern hit on the idea of letting visitors take a bit of the beach home with them in the form of metal lunch boxes with photos of Laguna Beach printed on all sides.

Now Ahern has 15 retail clients that sell “Beach in a Box” -- some as far away as Europe and some as close as Laguna Drugs.

Along the way, Ahern has refined her concept.

Beach in a Box originally came with a DVD of Laguna sounds, but that idea floundered.

“Because an empty box has various uses, it just sells better empty than full.... The original idea was with the DVD, but out of my clients, only one of 15 sells it that way.”

So what’s next for Ahern and her lunch boxes?

“I originally started it as Beach in a Box to share Laguna with the world, and it morphed into Branding in a Box for corporations.... This [Beach in a Box] is really more of a prototype for corporate America.... It’s really a packaging device for anything.”

Ahern has already sold the packaging idea to the Pageant of the Masters and is looking for other customers.

“It will be in the VIP bags for at the Video Music Awards, so Beyonce will get one, Mariah Carey will get one, they’ll all get one.” With luck, they’ll want to put their pictures all over the boxes and use them to package a box set of their music.

If Branding in a Box doesn’t take off, there still is the original idea. Ahern says that many of her customers like Beach in a Box because it reminds them of the tin lunch boxes they used to have as kids.

To learn more about Beach in a Box, visit www.LagunaBeachinaBox.com. 20051216ir5oehknDON LEACH / COASTLINE PILOT(LA)Peggy Ahern was so successful with her Laguna “Beach in a Box,” she branched out to a whole series.