Design It Yourself Cause Marketing

Liberty Bottleworks, concluded a fun cause marketing contest at midnight last night that allows the winner a unique ‘canvas’ to express themselves on, as a well as donation to the cause of their choice.

Here’s how the contest worked.

People were invited to submit an original design for Liberty’s Earth Day bottle, it ended yesterday, President's Day in the United States.

The contest took place on Liberty’s Facebook page. The winner will be determined based on who gets the most likes on Facebook. In addition, proceeds from the sale of the Earth Day bottle benefits the charity of the winner’s choosing.

Liberty Botttleworks are the only metal water bottles currently made in the United States. All of Liberty’s bottles are made of recycled aluminum using American-made machinery. Moreover, Liberty has the ability to print on its bottles basically anything a designer can imagine.

My Liberty bottle, whose sale benefits the charity called Big City Mountaineers, looks like urban graffiti. The Liberty bottle I bought for my brother-in-law has an apple pattern over a white background that looks for all the world like enamel.

With this contest, Liberty makes good use of its remarkable ability to print on its bottles. But given all of Liberty’s printing capabilities I was a little underwhelmed by the designs I saw.

Liberty is offering a canvas at least as interesting as what’s available to artists and designers at threadless.com. But none of the Liberty’s Earth Day contestants had design chops like TimShumate, who did the cool Lincoln illustration above for Threadless.

I hope Liberty keeps mashing together design and cause marketing. And I really hope it gets traction with talented designers and artists like TimShumate.

MARCH 2, 2012 UPDATE:

The Earth Day design contest was won by Angie Reed Jackson, who garnered more than 500 votes of the 1,100 or so cast.

Seven dollars from the sale of each bottle will go to the school in Tennessee that she choose as her cause.

Runner up Bentia Kim finished with about 30 fewer votes than Jackson.

Jackson's design is on the left.

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