VETERAN BUSINESS OWNERS AND THEIR CHALLENGE COINS

Designing Challenge Coins is always a pleasure; however, when you get to develop something for your own community, a group of kickass veteran business owners it opens up so much more joy!   To say that we were excited when Justin Szerletich of Szerds, reached out to Pitch and Rudder, to design the challenge coin is an understatement!  We knew that this coin would be handed out to every veteran and spouse attending the convention and we wanted to make sure that it left a lasting impression.   Making a Custom Challenge coins for Veteran Business Owners spanning all the different branches of service, it was important that we made it either very general or included all the different branches of service.  Like with most designs and contracts that we work, we did both.

GETTING THE RIGHT FLOW

As we began the process of brainstorming, really hammering out what would be cost effective for the client and still make an immediate impact in the swag bags we came up a very clever idea that we had done in the past.  QRC technology is not new by any means, but its normally found on coins.  We recently had completed a coin for a Chiefs mess SRT-2 in which we had utilized a QRC code to link back from their coin to a secret Facebook group.  The Coin was a huge hit, so on the table, we put Linking Conference Influencers presentations to the coins by a laser QRC.  The initial design looked like this:

 

Now, this was with keeping all the branches of service on the coin.  The square in the middle would have been raised up and held the QRC code for the presentations.   As we continued to progress on the design we moved away from the QRC code but kept at this time the branches of service.  Our second rendering looked like this:

We started working on a revolver feel on the back of the coin, we removed the flag background and put it into on the chambers and added the branched around.  We removed the QRC code and inserted our logo, as a guide rod holder.  At this point, we were contemplating, should we make the backspin like a regular revolver.  We thought it would be a very cool feature of the coin, basically, you never know which chamber you’re going to get when you start messing with a bunch of kickass veteran business owners!  We moved away from this design because we were asked to incorporate the sponsors of the event into the back of the coin and in a revolver setting we would not be able to do each one justice.

FINAL DESIGN

Once we went back to the drawing board for the third time developing the final product wasn’t that hard.  We set out all the sponsors vectored logos on a sheet and arranged them as a team.  Looking at the logos how they fit together like a puzzle and using the branding manual, the final design kind of developed itself.  Now came the coloring aspect.  We wanted to make sure that everything was as seamless as possible, we offered 18 color combinations for the final product.  To include these:

Once, we had all the images build up and the designs settled on; we created 3 samples in silver.  White, Black, and Navy Blue.

Conference Leadership decided to go with the white coins and we pushed headstrong into production.  Giving us our final product as:

 

Collaboration with other Veteran Business Owners are awesome, they help everyone build better networking infostructures and communities.   We really enjoyed working with Justin at Szerds and are looking forward to many more events.  Justin’s company tailors executive gifts for events and companies looking to find veteran made merchandise that has been vetted for quality.  His catalog has 33  vendors, covering a gambit of swag from tier one merch to tier three, he can meet any and all your needs!  On top of Szerds, he is a Biztalk radio host in the San Diego area, Justin has his hands in everything, so if you need it chances are he can find it.  The 2018 Military Influencers Conference Custom Challenge coin is available for sale in our shop and can be purchased with the optional gift box or in the standard PVC sleeve.  If you’re interested in Purchasing a Coin please follow the link here.

VETERAN BUSINESS OWNERS #GOCUSTOM

Making Custom Challenge Coins is always awesome, it truly is a labor of love!  Working with Veteran Business Owners makes it even better, sitting down and video conferencing as we go over your design ideas, importing you into our Project management software so you can track your custom coins progress is inspiring!  We work every day to make it easier for you to #GOCUSTOM, Click the link on the bottom of the page, tell us what you’re looking for and upload a few images!  Let us work our magic and bring your imagination to life, or scratch something on a barroom napkin, send us a snapshot of it and see how badass our designers really are!  One of the coolest coins we’ve designed so far came to us on a napkin from a husband making something special for his retiring wife.  Whatever the case, just know we make it easy to #GOCUSTOM!