Elephant Trunk Mailbox Evolves to Fit a New Purpose

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Sunday, October 28, 2012

Elephant Trunk Mailbox Evolves to Fit a New Purpose

By NICOLE LaPORTE

WHEN asked how the Elephant Trunk, a large, lockable mailbox, got its name, Vanessa Troyer laughed and rolled her eyes. You could tell she had been asked the question many times.

“The name Elephant Trunk came about just because the Elephant Trunk can hold a lot,” Ms. Troyer, 48, said recently, sitting in a conference room at Architectural Mailboxes, the company that she and her husband, Chris Farentinos, 45, run in Redondo Beach, Calif. “It was as big as a baby elephant” — and not just its nose.

That, it turned out, was a problem. Back in 1999, when she and Mr. Farentinos dreamed up the Elephant Trunk, it was designed to be large enough to hold the television-size computers that people were ordering as e-commerce began to take off. But while it was still in prototype, flat-screen computer monitors came along, defeating its purpose.

“It was deflating,” Ms. Troyer said. “All this time and money and energy had been wasted.”

If Ms. Troyer did not sound all that deflated, it’s because the Elephant Trunk is back — in a slightly modified form. Now more the size of a baby panda, it is being introduced in 157 Home Depot stores around the country in a three-month test run. Mr. Farentinos, a former designer of baseball bats, says he wants it to become a “lifestyle product” that no household can do without. Just as everyone has a mailbox for snail mail, he hopes that everyone will soon have an Elephant Trunk for home-delivered packages.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.