Every year, our hometown of Lowell, MA holds the Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race—a five mile course through the city where teams build human-powered sculptures that traverse road, mud and water to achieve glory! Rudy and I have participated in the race for the last three years, first with Big Fish and recently with The Aluminum Falcon Experience as part of Team Lowell Makes. Building these sculptures is truly an act of extreme engineering and design to make the equivalent of a mini pedal powered Duck Boat. Rudy has chronicled this process on his blog, which I encourage all of you to check out.
Currying Favor
One of the fun design aspects of the race is “bribing” the judges. There are three judges for the race—wearing the appropriate regal garb—and teams are encouraged to offer creative trinkets to them to “influence” their judgement.
Now, this is a challenge I can really get into!! Creating the bribes was my responsibility, so I put my best promotional marketer’s hat on to come up with a bribe package that couldn’t be beat. We decided on a gift bag for each judge with branded merch.
What’s in the bag?
There are so many wonderfully creative folks at Lowell Makes so we reached out to the community to help us produce promotional items for the bribes. Since we are The Aluminum Falcon Experience, we centered the branding around all things Star Wars/Millenium Falcon.
Here’s what we included in the bags:
- Gift bag branded with The Aluminum Falcon Experience logo
- The Aluminum Falcon Experience t-shirt
- Embroidered mission patch
- Embroidered Falcon key chain
- Custom Aluminum Falcon Chewbacca stickers
- Falcon mini pins
The T-Shirt
A big thanks to the folks at Jaguar Printing for printing up our shirts in record time! We always do a team t-shirt, so everyone who worked on the sculpture gets one. We made a few extra this year so we had plenty on hand to add to the bribe bags. I also modified the team logo for this year’s race, opting for black and dark gray backgrounds with white and yellow lettering to really stand out.
The Mission Patch
A recent hobby of mine is machine embroidery. Rudy came up with the idea of creating a patch similar to a NASA or Air Force mission patch for our sculpture. After a lot of research, I iterated through several designs to make the perfect patch. However, designing something online does not always translate to the real world.
Many of my early attempts did not produce well, with the text being especially difficult to stitch. I worked with Falcon Embroidery (great name, right?) to finalize the digitized embroidery file. The result was a super-profesh-looking patch with an iron-on backing.
The Keychain
We truly lucked out to have the wonderful Judie Barnhill offer to create these amazing Falcon keychains. The fobs are made from felted vinyl and machine embroidered. In addition to out-of-this-world keychains, Judie also specializes in bag making—purses, backpacks, water bottle holders and such. Check out her Instagram and Facebook pages to see more.
The Stickers
Who doesn’t love stickers? I wanted to design a fun sticker not only for the bribe bags but also to hand out to spectators at the event. We have a Chewbacca stuffie as our mascot, so I created an illustration of Chewy riding in the Falcon. The illustration style referenced this year’s race poster designed by Lowell artist Eyeformation, known for his popular “Happy Clouds” illustrations. A big thanks to Toph O’Leary for fine tuning the stickers and getting them printed for race day!
The Pins
A few days before the race I still hadn’t worked out the kinks on the mission patch and felt that our bribe bags might fall short. That’s when Lowell Makes’ Matt Morin offered to make us pins to hand out to the crowd and include in our bribes. I sent him the design for the mission patch and he printed out the center illustration and fabricated the mini pins. They are a super-fun addition to all the cool swag we created.
The Result
After all that work, we won the award for Best Bribes for LKSR 2024!! It was so great to win this one after a very soggy race day. I’m glad the judges were impressed and I think we raised the bar for this award for years to come.
