This vertical rectangular cookie tin is printed all over with a floral tendril pattern in white on a black background. It can be carried using the white handle on top. Textile artist Ella Margold designed this tin in 1915 for Hermann Bahlsen’s cookie factory. Having acquired the company in 1889, Hermann Bahlsen grew it into one of Germany’s leading cookie manufacturers. Apart from the usual cardboard packaging, there had already been metal cookie tins that served a decorative function when displayed on tables laid for coffee. Hermann Bahlsen’s unique advertising strategy for these tins involved relegating the manufacturer’s logo to the bottom of the tin, allowing the other sides to be devoted entirely to decoration. In 1912, he first commissioned Ella Margold and her husband Emanuel Josef Margold to design imaginative, high-quality packaging that customers would immediately recognize as a product of the Bahlsen factory by virtue of its design rather than the company’s name. The results are outstanding specimens of artistic packaging from the early 20th century and early examples of what we now know as corporate design – a widespread brand strategy in which manufacturers are recognizable from the overall appearance of their products instead of merely the company logo. The floral elements filling the sides of the tin reveal the influence of the Wiener Werkstätte or Vienna Workshop – a productive association for which the Margolds had worked before moving to Darmstadt in 1911.