The Project: Our client, Pen Underwriting, was looking an innovative way to represent their brand and make an impression at BIBA 2018. BIBA – The British Insurance Brokers Association yearly conference and exhibition, is a leading event for the insurance sector when different actors can exhibit and offer their services. Together with Pen’s head of marketing we settled for providing visual representations of their different business sectors, 3D printed Pen pens as giveaways, and having 3D printers on the show to attract attendees to the stand.
Pen’s business revolves around providing insurance policies for buildings, and one of their main great advantages is that they can provide very specific policies for industries that won’t find help in standard insurances. The different sectors Pen works with are divided into four categories, four types of building: volume (residential), commercial, specialty (industries with very specific hazards), international & financial. This is all gathered under a virtual city named Pen City: the first objective was therefore to 3D print Pen City.
Pens are of course a necessary tool of the insurance business and everyone likes having a nice pen. The idea was therefore to provide a pen that people would want to take and display , a pen bearing the Pen logo, that had an appealing and elegant appearance while having a cool side of being 3D printed.
Finally, the point of having 3D printer on the stand printing would have the double consequence of drawing people to Pen’s stand, while showing the innovative a forward thinking side of the company in a sector that remains traditional for the most part.
How we did it: Pen City was based on existing designs to make communication easier for the first steps. These designs were altered by iMakr’s design team under the instructions of Pen’s marketing team to make them part of Pen City. The models were then made printable and had to be printed before the event. Trees, people, and other models were also printed to give life to Pen City. Fused Filament Fabrication was used to print most buildings, while some small features and models were printed with Resin printers.
The Pen pen was designed from scratch by iMakr’s design team, following a step by step process involving communication with Pen’s marketing team between each step to find the design that best fitted the event and purpose of the pen. It was then printed using resin printers to ensure a perfectly smooth and premium feel of the pens. The 3D printed shells were then fitted with off-the-shelf nibs ands cartridges.
Finally, a member of iMakr went on site was with Pen on the site of exhibition to operate the printers and make sure any questions relating to 3D printing would not remain unanswered.
For Pen Underwriting’s head of marketing, BIBA 2018 was a huge success.