As you may have heard, the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum has been asked to vacate its current site, and so is seeking for donations to help pay for the move and purchasing a new facility. The museum is located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and houses the world’s largest collection of wood type, estimated to be over 1.5 million pieces. The building that bears its name is the place where the long extinct Hamilton Wood Type company began producing type in 1880 and within 20 years became the largest provider in the United States.

As lovers of type, our team couldn’t pass on the opportunity of contributing to this effort and to help save an important piece of Americana. We discussed a few fundraising ideas and the winning one was… cupcakes in-a-jar! That’s right, we loved Nicole Minoza’s proposal of putting the whole team’s baking skills to the test. The concept was fun, bold, timely (upcoming Valentine’s Day), and would surely entice a broad range of people.

There was a lot of work ahead of us, so we set goals for ourselves and started working on it right away. Nicole was in charge of all the logistics, from acquiring the baking supplies to booking the advertising spots, and I became responsible for designing the promotional materials. We knew our campaign had to be extraordinary in order to grab people’s attention.

To make sure everyone understood the product and the purpose behind it, we decided to have one jar on display in each break room (around 40 in San Jose and San Francisco), with a paper stand that would carry our message. And we couldn’t be happier with how things have gone. When we deployed the campaign last week, people’s reaction was phenomenal. In just a couple of days we reached half of our goal, and we’re on track to sellout today.

Kudos to Caleb Belohlavek and his wife Sandy, for baking and assembling the sample batch of cupcakes. They were so successful that a handful of jars didn’t make it to the end of the week. I truly sympathize with the Adobe colleagues who did such a feat, because I must confess that I couldn’t resist the temptation either. The yummy-looking jar I had was truly tasty!

And a special Thank You to the people outside our team that helped us put this effort together. To Matthew Kelsey for donating the letterpress printing of the stands for the break rooms. To John Sullivan of Logos Graphics for donating the photopolymer plate. To Jamie Saunders of Neenah Paper for donating the paper (CLASSIC CREST® Cover, SAWGRASS 80C, Smooth Finish). And to my wife, Tiffany Wardle, for leveraging her social cloud and connecting our team to these generous individuals.

Stay tuned because next week we’ll have more news and some footage of the team in action. Meanwhile, please consider donating to the Hamilton museum.