During a week-long celebration held early in 2011, Ohio Wesleyan University deployed packaging to help commemorate Jackie Robinson’s signing by Branch Rickey (OWU-’67) as the first African-American baseball player into Major League Baseball (MLB).
To make it happen, OWU relied on Plastic Technologies Inc., and Bowling Green-based Century Marketing Group (CMG) to pinch-hit for them. At issue was a unique and recently patented dual-cavity bottle called the Smiler--and OWU’s fast-approaching Rickey-Robinson celebration. Emergent Technologies developed the bottle, which is shaped in the form of a sphere. With its shrink-wrapped label, the container resembles a baseball. That caught the attention of Mark Cooper, OWU’s director of marketing and communication.
“When I saw it,” Cooper recalls, “I knew the custom-printed, baseball-shaped bottle would make a great souvenir for our Rickey-Robinson event. We thought we’d fill it with candy and put one of several motivational quotes in the secret compartment underneath. Beyond that, we thought that one bottle could contain a unique quote, with the random recipient of that bottle winning a prize tied to the event. We thought it would make our celebration that much more special.”
