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- Trophies and sustainability
Case study: The EmprendeXXI Awards 2025 — Trophies Made From Recycled Fishing Nets
An award program that has backed more than 600 companies since 2007 asked for a physical recognition equal to that record.
We designed and manufactured the 2025 EmprendeXXI custom trophies, rebuilding the la Caixa star in recycled fishing-net plastic.
Index
The Commission
The EmprendeXXI Awards are the entrepreneurship recognition program driven by CaixaBank through DayOne, its division for technology companies and investors, with the collaboration of Enisa in Spain and Banco BPI in Portugal.
Its scale sets the terms of the commission. Across 19 editions since 2007, the program has invested more than 11 million euros and recognized over 600 winning companies. The 2025 edition drew 1,006 applications from Spain and Portugal, of which only 38 won.
The awards also reach unusually wide. Nineteen regional prizes of 6,000 euros each — seventeen in Spain, one per autonomous community, and two in Portugal — are handed out through spring, before the national final in Barcelona. Winners earn international training at innovation hubs including MIT in Boston.
The 2025 edition also ran three national categories:
- Business Transformation — innovation with transformative impact on companies and markets
- Human & Wellbeing — physical and emotional quality of life
- Living Planet — ecological transition and sustainability
The commission called for a trophy that carried the program's own identity into physical form: an object immediately recognizable as the EmprendeXXI Awards and CaixaBank. That meant working from the institution's defining asset — the la Caixa star, created by Joan Miró in 1980.
Every institution has an emblem
We can turn it into an object a winner can hold
Request your custom trophyThe Design Challenge
The object had to reconstruct the la Caixa star as a physical, multi-part form, in two coordinated formats. We produced two versions:
- A large trophy for the national category winners — 11 units
- A smaller trophy for the regional winners — 19 units, one per territory
Thirty pieces in total, split across two scales of the same visual language.
The real difficulty was the assembly. The emblem is not a single silhouette but a composition — Miró's five-pointed star flanked by two circles — each a separate cut piece that has to sit in exactly the same position on every trophy. For our designer, Laura Talaya, the constraint that governed the build was holding that registration across all thirty units, at two different scales.
The Making
We cut the star from recycled HDPE — high-density polyethylene made entirely from fishing nets recovered across the Mediterranean — the same 100% recycled material behind our recycled fishing net trophies.
We worked it in the blue closest to the la Caixa brand color, keeping the mottled grain of the recovered plastic: a tone that shifts from pale blue to deep navy across a single star.
Each star was cut to 10 mm — thick enough to give the emblem a visible edge rather than the flatness of a printed logo — and mounted on a 2 mm lacquered steel base carrying the DayOne and Premios EmprendeXXI marks.
The two formats hold one language at two scales: 18 cm and roughly 650 g for the national winners, 14 cm and 550 g for the regional ones.
The Object
What a winner receives is the la Caixa star rebuilt in recovered plastic — resolved into the object that names them.
Two sizes, one emblem, made the same way for every winner. And the star makes the same point the program does: that the money it puts behind new ideas should also answer for what it's made of.
Programs that treat recognition as a long-term commitment tend to commission custom trophies built to defined material specifications. Across 19 editions the EmprendeXXI Awards have backed the companies building that future; the object they now hand over is made to the same standard.
