Une Femme, a women-owned and operated wine brand, wanted to do an out-of-the-box product seeding campaign. Together, we came up with an idea called "The Hall of Femme," where we would showcase a different woman every day for 365 days, highlighting their achievements in shattering glass ceilings. Each recipient received a written exposé that would be featured on Une Femme's website along with an eye-catching gift...

I designed a beautiful wine crate where the recipient had to shatter stunt glass with a provided toffee hammer to access the wine below. Suffragettes used toffee hammers in the early 20th century to shatter the windows of government buildings in protest.

Most PR packages are custom-made using cardboard. To make 'The Femmy' feel more like an award and less like a PR gift, we looked to traditional wine crates for inspiration. It was immediately clear that we should use wood. We went to the drawing board to experiment with ideas on how to make a wood box cool. I thought, "How do we make this an experience worth celebrating?". In the case of an emergency, you break glass to access a fire extinguisher... What if, in the case of celebration, you break glass to access wine? 💡

No one wants glass shards in their hand, so we devised a clever way to make the pane safe and mess-free. My first thought was to bake a translucent pane out of sugar so that it could be eaten, but fabrication complexities made this option cost-prohibitive. We then looked to prop houses in Hollywood for an alternative. When Tom Cruise flies through a window in MI:3, they're using a material called stunt glass that isn't actually glass. We found a prop house and convinced them to make custom panes for our crates.

At first, we thought our recipients would break the glass with their fists, but it didn't feel right. After some research, we learned that toffee hammers played a small but mighty role in the Women's Rights Movement, serving as a tool of protest.

The following is the spec I designed for our fabricator's reference. The box was entirely custom, so the directions needed to be crystal clear.