The Gold "CAP"
We made 300 medals out of whiskey bottle caps. It nearly didn't happen.
Client
BMW
Year
2025
Design Portfolio
Circular Design
Type of Work
Concept Development
Material Transformation
Design
BMW came to us for employee recognition medals for their Independence Day run. We had eight working days. We said yes.
Our first instinct was to source plastic in BMW's signature light blue and dark blue. Two days in, sourcing those shades, the project lead calls, they want gold. Not blue. Gold.
We rush back to our suppliers. Turns out whiskey bottle caps come in a gold shade. What an irony, whiskey caps are saving a sustainability project. Those caps went through a melting process, came out as flat sheets, and were cut by CNC machine into 300 round discs with a character you can't fake.
When the discs arrived, a new problem arose. Plastic doesn't take laser printing. Heat- based etching warps it. Screen printing peeled off within minutes. We needed the marathon details on each medal and had no way to put them there. The team landed on a solution: thin steel strips carrying the inscriptions, riveted across each disc. We sourced a gunmetal shade that made the medals look genuinely classy, went back out for the right rivets, rushed to a computerised metal cutting store, and got the strips done in two days. We had two days left.
In parallel, we tracked down a lanyard outlet and ordered in BMW's classic sports palette: light blue, dark blue, red. Then four of us spent an entire day at the factory, manually riveting 300 strips to 300 medals and attaching every lanyard by hand.
Two days later, the client called.
Their joy made every moment of the grind worthwhile. This was our first formal project. We learned at every step about materials, machines, timelines, and what it means to genuinely stand behind something you make. The medals started as 11 kilograms of discarded plastic and became something 300 people took home from a day they'll remember.
That's the kind of work we want to keep doing.
Because Change is beautiful!
