Pin program

This was a long running project, and one technically done for my corporate job, but it’s more of a labor of love. This pin program I developed and kept alive for years for the larger cross-functional orgs I led.

For a long time when we would launch big projects, we have a moment of celebration and then move on to the next thing. After a while, it was easy to forget all the great things you and your team put out in the world. We needed something to help the team remember the big work they contributed to, milestones reached, and to share in the broader org’s successes.

When it came to thinking what form this could take on, I landed on enamel pins as the medium because they felt precious (good size to weight ratio), weren’t very expensive when ordering several hundred (below $3/pin), it allowed us to be very abstract and creative, and nobody needed yet another t-shirt that screamed “I work at a tech company.”

Early designs for celebrating (clockwise from top left): People helping build APIs we externalize to 3P developers, the platform in general, celebrating launch of API logs, and a big overhaul of our documentation IA.
I enlisted the help of our Creative team to design these milestone pins for celebrating anniversaries. They used our at-the-time internal team brand system of colors and patterns.
For the International team, pins for the countries our team supported — onigiri for Japan, poutine for Canada, Vegemite for Australia, tea for UK, and cheeses for EU (brie for France, cheddar for Ireland, and Manchego for Spain).
For the International team, pins celebrating large project launches — surcharging, item splits, Latin American expansion, and scaleable QR codes in Checkout.

For large projects, I would design a pin to commemorate the effort, and then distribute to the team. We aimed to have a couple pins either quarterly or at minimum biannually.

I also handmade these cork boards displays, so folk could proudly show off their achievements on their desks in the office or at home. Making them myself drastically reduced the cost to have them produced (final unit cost of about $2.50). Over the years I probably made somewhere close to 300 boards.