Sellotape tins

The famous British made adhesive tape Sellotape was first introduced back in 1937 and the larger rolls were sold in lidded tins right through into the 1980s (although I seem to recall the very late one might have been plastic towards the end), I assume to keep the product airtight. So once it had been used, you were left with a useful tin for odds and ends. Like many I’ve used a couple of old Sellotape tins to store drawing pins and other stuff in for years. But then a different tin design to the ones I have turned up and my curiosity to find other examples saw me trawling the web. It’s actually quite hard to date these changes in design. Product adverts which survive invariably only show the small rolls sold for home use, and these were just wrapped in cellophane. The tins were mostly sold for office use, and it wasn’t a cheap product.
To me the curved logo tins would seem to be the oldest, and then the red and black tin comes next with the first use of the cursive logo with a squared edge to the letters. This logo then appeared on all the later tin package designs right through to the very plain ‘clear tape’ design. Except for that red and black tin, all go with the blue and white colourway.
As always the product’s own web page is long on flashy web coding, but very short on history. They show only one old tin, and that isn’t dated. But when you see them all together the designs do make a great collection and I can see myself weakening if I see any more for sale at fairs or junk shops in the future.
Within each basic design there are also other variations; price changes, alterations from imperial to metric measurements, and different sizes as well. There were also tall tins which held half a dozen rolls and were sold to stationary departments. If anyone spots any more do let me know.

There is a shot of some vintage spotty paper tape on the site!