Dog Tag | Raised Rosette

One of my favorite games is the challenge of taking something completely common and making it exceptional. It's more complicated than covering a turd with diamonds, but much easier than you might think. It's a distilling process where you find the important bits and play to their strengths. For me, there has always been a very painterly quality to the evolution of my hard goods. Things develop slowly, giving ideas time to breathe. But in the end, there's always a very narrow margin between shit and Shinola.

For a GOOD ART dog tag, we start with a sterling silver sheet, a custom die and an 80 ton press. There's more, but the major difference between casting a dog tag and stamping it from a sheet is in the density of the metal. These die struck dog tags are solid as fuck compared to one that is cast through a lost wax method. And that's just the easiest way to explain it.

Now, we have our sturdy, dense blank. The next part is the laser engraving, purity and trademarks on all; motifs on some. I'll tell you the story of why we do the engraving in-house some other time. For a raised motif like this, the Rosette is cast, cleaned and soldered on the top. For the last piece of the puzzle, we make a jump ring from wire - forming a perfect circle, cutting it open and fitting it through the tag. After soldering comes a bit more sanding and then polishing by hand. And there, my friend, is a textbook oversimplification of making an exceptional version of something common.

The dog tag works with the Pequeño A Mano chain and both A and AA Ball Chains.

Sterling silver. Made by hand at our Foundry in Los Angeles.