Put down the screen.
Pick up a hammer.
Lunch Bucket Buddies is a tin lunch bucket that shows up with a comic book and a real balsa-wood build kit inside. Kids meet nine buddies who each work a different trade, then build something with their own two hands — a different trade in every kit.
- Ages
- 7 to 12
- First kit
- Tin bucket, comic, build kit
- Every kit after
- Materials, comic, sticker
- Collector's edition
- First 200 buckets
The trades are short of people, and most kids never hear about them.
3 for every 5
Roughly three people come into the building trades for every five who retire out of them. Meanwhile the work pays well, starts without student debt, and can't be done from a laptop.
Randall "Randy" Meert spent his career in landscaping. Getting close to retirement, he looked around and noticed how few young people were coming up behind him — and how little a seven-year-old ever gets to see of what a carpenter, a plumber, or a concrete finisher actually does.
In high school, the trades felt like where you got sent when nothing else worked out. That's backwards. Today it's a career you can be proud of, and you can start it without debt.
Randall Meert, founder
Plant the seed early — nobody's deciding their career at eight. They just need to know the door is there.
Three things in the first bucket
The tin comes once, with the first kit. After that each delivery is the build materials, the next comic, and a sticker for the lid — the bucket stays home and fills up.
A real tin lunch bucket
Steel latch, folding handle, and a lid that keeps score. Ships with the first kit only — every kit after that adds a sticker to it.
Issue #1 of the comic
Nine bored kids get sent outside, find a shed full of tools, and end up building a Friendship Fort for the block party — with a retired safety officer keeping them honest.
Kit #1: a house frame
Twenty-odd laser-cut balsa panels, twelve pots of paint, a brush, and glue. No step-by-step sheet — figuring it out is the activity.
Open, read, build, stick a badge on the lid.
Every kit follows the same rhythm, so a kid knows what to expect and a parent knows what an afternoon looks like.
Roughly 60–90 minutes of table time, plus however long the painting takes.
Open the bucket
Comic, kit, paint, glue, and the collector's edition badge if you're one of the first 200.
Read the story
The buddies hit a problem — rain, a bad measurement, an argument over whose plan wins — and work it out as a crew.
Build it
Match the model to the photo. No instruction sheet. Trial, error, and a better idea on the second try.
Stick the sticker
Every finished kit earns one for the inside of the lid. Next kit lands with a different trade.
Nine buddies, nine trades, one supervisor
Every kid on the crew is good at one thing and needs the other eight for the rest. Mrs. Hayes, a retired construction safety officer, makes sure the gloves are on before the concrete gets mixed.
Sample widely, then go deep
Every kit is a different trade. Once a kid knows which one fits, that trade has a track of its own to climb.
Starter
Assemble and paint. Balsa, glue, a picture to match. Ages 7–8.
Intermediate
Moving parts and real measuring. Kit #2 is a working drawbridge.
Advanced
PVC and low-voltage electric. Circuits that switch, pipes that hold water. Ages 11–12.
Pre-apprentice
Skills a shop would actually hire for — enough to hold a summer job on a crew.
- Carpentry
- Plumbing
- Electrical
- HVAC
- Concrete
- Excavating
- Landscaping
- Roofing
- Painting
- Surveying
Early days, on purposeKit #1 is real and shipping. The trades below are the plan we are building toward, and the order and timing will shift as each kit gets made and tested.
A different trade in every kit
Nobody knows what they are good at until they have done it. The kits rotate through carpentry, structures, plumbing, wiring, concrete and landscaping so a kid gets a real taste of each before deciding anything.
When one of them keeps pulling them back, there is somewhere to go: landscaping already has a twenty-mission track written behind it, and the rest follow.
Buying for a classroom, a camp, or a builders association?
See group optionsA collector's tin that fills up
Two hundred buckets, each numbered, and the collector's edition badge is printed once. Issue #1 and Kit #1 arrive inside; every kit after that earns another sticker for the lid.