Massage Brush

Often hard to judge packaging from other countries and especially places like Russia where for a long time they went their own basic way with design. Here’s an interesting box though, which held a ‘massaging brush’. The quality is the artwork is below what we in the West might expect from a product like this, but the stylised image of the flame haired woman is great. It was sent in by Tim Campbell who was so taken by the look of it that he’s working on turning it into a print. A bit hard to date, it clearly has a lot of the sixties about it, but we suspected it was probably produced in the 1980s.
Tim has looked closer for us and confirms a manufacturing date of 1985. “Bearing in mind that this was new at the height of Communism, you would have to request the product from the store assistant who would pull it from its shelf slot (hence the box having text on all sides and the ends), fill in a chit, get it counter signed by someone else, take the chit and pay at a till, then back to surly assistant for collection.”
I remember visiting Poland that very same year and experiencing the joys of shopping in a Communist country (which mostly consisted of people sidling up to you in the shops to try and buy your jeans and shoes off you. Quite how this transaction was to be carried out I never discovered).