A landscaper, a shortage, and a lunch table.
Lunch Bucket Buddies didn't start as a toy. It started as a worry about who's going to build things twenty years from now.
Getting close to retirement, looking around, and not seeing anybody behind you
Randall "Randy" Meert built a career in landscaping. As retirement got closer he started thinking about the next chapter — and kept running into the same thing on every job. Crews couldn't find help. Nobody young was coming up.
Once he started paying attention, the number showed up everywhere: about three people entering the building trades for every five heading out. All the complaining about not finding help suddenly made arithmetic sense.
The second thing he kept thinking about was high school. Back then, the trades were the place kids landed when the rest of school didn't work — Plan B, more or less. That framing stuck around long after it stopped being true. The work pays, it's in demand, and it doesn't start with a decade of student loans.
So the question became a design problem: how do you show an eight-year-old that this door exists, in a way that's actually fun?
Kids love working with their hands. They love being part of a group. Put those together and you get a table at school where everybody's lunch bucket says the same thing.
Randall Meert, founder
Kit #1 in progress. The photo on the box is the only instruction they get.
How the idea took shape
None of this happened in a weekend. The lunch bucket came first, then everything else got built around it.
Notice the gap
Fewer young people entering the trades, and no exposure to them before high school.
Start with the lunch bucket
Picture a table in an elementary cafeteria where every kid has the same tin bucket. That's the crew.
Put something in it
A build kit, so the bucket comes with an activity instead of just a logo.
Give the crew names
Nine kids, nine trades, and a comic that gets them off the couch and into a shed full of tools.
Print the first 200
A numbered collector's edition, out the door to families, classrooms, and camps.
Hands beat screens, without being anti-tech
Every trade runs on technology now — surveying gear, load calculations, design software. The point isn't that screens are bad. It's that a kid who has only ever swiped has never found out what they're good at with their hands.
No instruction sheet
Kit #1 ships with a photo of the finished model and nothing else. Kids get handed solutions constantly. Working out how the pieces go together — getting it wrong, trying again — is the actual lesson.
The trades are a first choice
Good money, real demand, and no debt to dig out of before you start earning. We talk about the trades the way people talk about medical school: as something to aim at.
Some of it can't be automated
Somebody still has to be on the roof, in the trench, under the sink. Even when machines do more of the lifting, the person who knows how it should be done is the one running the job.
Next: builds that leave something behind
The long-term plan is bigger than a model on a shelf. When enough buddies are in one city, we want to run a community build — pick a project with a local partner, design it, and spend a Saturday putting it up together.
Think Eagle Scout project, but for a crew of kids who have been practicing all year. Building with a purpose, for somebody besides yourself.
Randall Meert
Founder. Career landscaper, and the reason there's a buddy named Randy holding a rake.
Cristian S. Aluas
Art and graphic design. Every panel, character, and cover in Issue #1.
Say hello
hello@lunchbucketbuddies.com
Questions, partnerships, or a school that wants a crate of buckets.