#Music box concept is made from coffee grounds with an aluminum hat

Christmas, at least the actual day, is all but over, but it’s never too early to start thinking about gift ideas for next year. Music boxes are always a popular idea for the holidays since it can also be used the whole year round. It’s also one of those things that you can innovate on, design-wise since there are a lot of shapes, colors, designs, concepts, and tunes that you can play around with. Even the materials that are used can also be played around with, like with this concept for a music box made from recycled materials.

Designer: Hyunbin Kim

Snowie is a concept for a Christmas music box that is built from an unlikely source: coffee grounds. It’s not normally associated with this product but we’re always on the lookout for ways to recycle something as common as coffee grounds. This music box is also not really a box as the shape of the base is a huge round mound of coffee grounds, sort of evoking a coffee bean although it’s not really bean-shaped. Since it’s a Christmas product it’s more about a snowball except it’s brown since it’s made from coffee.

It also has a cute “hat” on top called a Snowie hat which uses aluminum material with a polishing technique finish. The hat spring serves as the winding mechanism for the music box component. Once you insert it on top and wind it up, the Christmas music is supposed to play. There is also a magnetic Snowie nose that is made from coffee grounds and other materials to give it a lighter color. There doesn’t seem to be a functional component to it other than to give the music box (or circle) a cute nose. It can also be either round or triangular.

If you mix the coffee grounds with other materials, you can also get other colors of the Snowie music box. Other than brown, there are also renders of ivory and white colors, although it’s not really clear what other materials can be mixed. Well, there’s still a year to perfect this concept or have an actual product in time for Christmas 2025.