Phone 
Email
- Trophies and sustainability
Case Study: TextilWirtschaft Forum 2026 — Turning a Monogram into a Trophy
The 67th edition of the German fashion industry's central gathering called for a new award. In this case study we follow the custom trophies we designed and manufactured for the TextilWirtschaft Forum 2026 — the publication's TW monogram translated into a compact, freestanding object.
Contents
The Commission
The TextilWirtschaft Forum has been the annual meeting point of the German fashion and textile industry since 1959, and the 2026 edition was its 67th — held in the year the publication itself turned 80.
It took place in April at the Gesellschaftshaus of the Palmengarten in Frankfurt am Main, where roughly 550 guests gathered — decision-makers from across retail and industry.
The award it honors carries a matching lineage. 130 Forum awards have been presented since 1959, decided each year by a jury — in 2026, a panel of sixteen.
Four TW Forum Prizes were awarded that evening:
- Marc O'Polo — the entrepreneurship award; a German casualwear group.
- Ottolinger — the Design award; the Berlin label of Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient.
- Uniqlo — the Japanese "LifeWear" retailer.
- Zellerfeld — the Innovation award; a Hamburg maker of 3D-printed footwear.
The commission was specific: a single design, produced as a set of four — one for each winner — built from the publication's own monogram.
The Design Challenge
The brief left little room for interpretation. Faithful award design starts from the client's own marks, and here that meant the TW icon — TextilWirtschaft's monogram — translated into a solid object.
An icon is drawn to work flat, in one plane; as a three-dimensional object it has to carry its own weight, stand upright, and hold a clear front-facing reading from a stage several meters from the nearest guest.
Four geometric directions were modeled before the final form was chosen:
- A standard extrusion of the monogram — pushing the flat letters straight back into depth. This was the direction ultimately selected.
- A vertical extrusion — the letters pulled down into tall parallel columns, a totem read from the top.
- A pyramidal wedge — the TW set on the upper face of a block that tapers in depth towards the top.
- A donut-like form — the letters curving around a round body built from rings that rise toward the center.
The real difficulty sat inside the letters themselves. Working with designer Laura Talaya, the central problem to resolve was the junction: a secure bridge joining the T and the W into one continuous volume, strong enough to hold as a single object, without eroding the clear reading of either letter where they meet.
Your logo already holds the shape of an award.
See how we turn a brand mark into a memorable object.
Request your custom trophyThe Making
We produced the trophy through 3D printing, building the form layer by layer rather than casting it in a mold, which suited the faceted geometry the design required.
The finished object stands 22 cm tall — 12 cm wide, 5 cm deep — and weighs 700 grams.
The finish demanded its own patience. We sprayed the object in black and worked it to an ultra-gloss surface across every face, holding that high-gloss black even and uninterrupted over each edge.
The Object
The result is a compact black volume that carries the name of the publication and needs nothing more. The base disappears into the letterforms: the letters are the structure, and the structure is the trophy.
Eighty years of TextilWirtschaft set the terms: a custom trophy that belongs to this forum and no other, and keeps saying so long after the evening ends.
Clean and exact, it puts the forum's structural clarity and contemporary spirit into one form. Four of them were carried out of the Palmengarten that night; in ten years, each one will still name exactly where it came from.
