Tuesday 14 May 2013

14/5 - Poster Pins Set

At the recent London 2012 sale and auction in Coventry, one reader managed to pick up a set that was never released even though the pins form part of the 2,012 designs that were initially planned.

Pins 705 - 731

The pins are a set of IOC posters from previous Summer Olympic Games from 1896 - 2008. The pins are numbered 705-731 and are the same posters as pins 732 - 758.

The slight differences are that...

  • the new pins are 22mm x 30mm and therefore a little smaller than the original pins (25mm x 35mm)
  • they were only available (or not available as it turned out) as a framed set in an IOC Olympic Museum branded box (see image below
  • The Mexico 1968 and Los Angeles 1984 designs are slightly different (images below)
IOC Olympic Museum Branded Packaging

Pin 0748 - Mexico 1968 Poster
(individual pin)

Pin 0721 - Mexico 1968 Poster
(from set)

Pin 0752 - Los Angeles 1984 Poster
(individual pin)
Pin 0725 - Los Angeles 1984 Poster
(from set)

4 comments:

Mikeyboy said...

I'd love to know the story as to why these were never released! If anyone from LOCOG or Honav is reading would you be able to share some insight?

Pippin said...

So, overall then, how many pins were not released? And why produce lots of near-identical pins, and then totally ignore all of the other good ideas for pin themes that were put forward almost three years ago?

It makes a nonsense of advertising that there would be 2,012 pins, and then failing to release about 5% of them. If you add to these all the pins for which only a small proportion of the "edition size" went on sale, then you start to wonder how much income was lost to London 2012.

In the end, it all boils down to a huge overstatement by Honav on their capabilities when they tendered for the official supplier role, followed by a mismanagement of pin production there-after. I wonder what all those disappointed British companies are thinking right now?

Anthony said...

it doesnt really matter what they think because Honav have made their money over here and moved on to pastures new where they will, no doubt, disappoint the collectors of Brazil before disappearing off into the sunset once more.
unfortunately, they dont think they need to rely on return business and just need to make empty promises for two years. by the time, the collectors figure out how useless they are, theyre gone again.
what they havent figured out yet is the pin collecting community is a fairly close knit one and people from here will talk to people in rio and i, for one, am determined to let people over there know how cr*p they are. primarily because one of their employees gave me a list of non-honav pins to find so they could try to put together a complete collection of the 2012 pins, and then once i had laid out a fair amount of money to find a lot of them, my emails stopped getting replied to, the guy in questions phone number changed and the pins he promised to find for me never arrived.
i suspect i am not the only one that has been let down so people of rio, be warned!!!

Mikeyboy said...

As lovely as this set is, it's essentially just duplicating the existing poster pins. That's what disappoints me the most. We had umpteen logo pins, TWO versions of mascot sports pose printed pins (which themselves were simply duplicating the enamel version) and then the farce of the "2013th" Paralympic Village pin.

And we didn't get Paralympic Pin of the Day, Para Torch Relay, Para Flags of Nations, Para history, Sochi or Rio pins. It ought to have been easy to come up with 2012 designs!