Brady Bunch Lunchbox set - $938

It's that time of the year again, back to school! New books, a new bag, and of course a new lunchbox set decorated with your childs favorite characters... Did you know lunchboxes are collectibles as well? A nice example of a collectible lunchbox is the 1970 Brady Bunch lunchbox set pictured here, which recently sold for $938.

This item is another example of how two collecting niches come together. There is the lunchbox collector, who might consider this a rare and beautiful lunchbox, and there is the Brady Bunch character collector that collects everything related to the Brady Bunch. In this article we will focus on the lunchbox collectible aspect, but let's start with some facts about the televsion series The Brady Bunch.

The Brady Bunch was a television series about a couple that marries to form a new family. Not your usual family though, since both Mr. and Mrs. Brady each had three children from a previous marriage. The idea for the Brady Bunch was born in 1966, when Sherwood Schwartz wrote a pilot episode formed around his idea. None of the major networks wanted to pick it up though. By 1968 however, the time was ripe, and ABC started the production of the show. The first episode aired in september 1969, and after four seasons, the last episode of the original Brady Bunch series aired in march 1972. Several spin-offs were created, like a cartoon about the Brady kids, movies and mini-series. A nice Brady fan and collectible site is Bradyworld.com.

Back to our lunch box. Although lunchboxes were available long before, the lunchbox concept of the kind we are all familiar with did not start until 1950. In that year, a company named Aladdin Industries started applying Hopalong Cassidy decals to its lunchbox and thermos sets. With the popularity of the Hopalong Cassidy character, the Aladin set was an immediate hit and lunchbox sales soared from 50.000 to 600.000 per year. For a couple of years, Aladdin industries had the lunchbox monopoly and successfully so. In 1953, however, American Thermos joined the market. They did not use decals on their boxes, but produced fully lithographed boxes that were very appealing to the eye. American Thermos sold over 2.5 million of their first Roy Rogers (turned down by Aladdin) lunchbox set in the first year! The 1960s really got the market going, with many popular TV characters appearing on lunchboxes. Lunchbox history does not stop there though. Detailed histories can be found on the sites mentioned below.

There's plenty of lunchbox collecting sites out there. One of the nicer ones we found is The Lunch Box Pad, a nicely designed site with lots of historic information, pictures and appraisal and value information. Another site is Lunchboxcollector.com, which has similar information. In both cases, be careful when assessing the value of a lunchbox you might have because the values mentioned sometimes seem to be low when compared to actual sales prices on sites like Ebay. To give you an example, the Brady Bunch lunchbox set discussed here is shown to have a value of approximately $330, yet it sold for $930 as we can see above.