Our customers who are race directors always come to us with all kinds of special requests. After all, custom race medals is the special incentive that captures runners attention, so creating one that is unique to their race is something that is not taken lightly. When the race directors from Cirque Series contacted us with a special challenge: an eco-friendly wood race medal, we accepted it without any hesitation!
The Race Medal Design
As you probably know, most race medals are made with zinc alloy material and then color filled. Since The Cirque series is a trail race that take place on the mountains of various ski resorts, we tossed around the idea of using wood as the race medal material. In addition, instead of using color fill technique as we usually do, we wanted to try laser engraving the design. This will be eco-friendly and give a minimalistic look that the client is going for.
Our designers went to work with this idea in mind and came up with some mockup for the client to review. They liked the simplistic design on wood finish, the medals bring nature and eco-friendliness to mind.
The Production
Since we are using unfinished wood pieces in this project, each medal color will vary slightly, as it naturally would.
Another request from the client was that they do not want to use traditional race medal neckbands, they feel it does not match the esthetics of wood medals, and we agree. They suggested using paracord, as in the rope used in outdoor gear and survival tools. It is an unexpected material to use but we all thought it would work perfectly. We went ahead and sourced paracords in different colors. Each race in the series will have a unique paracord color for easy distribution. In a race where there are a separate medals for each distance, it is important to have distinct neckbands so volunteers can easily sort out.
The resulting medals are unique and one of a kind. The client was happy how they have turned out, and how they are aligned with their values and nature of the race. From the look of the runners faces we think they agree too!
