Cristaux founder Andre Janus and his team have designed James Beard awards, crystal mortar bombs for the US Marine Corps, trophy cups for the World Poker Tour, 18-karat gold beer bottles for Anheuser-Busch — which led to a misunderstanding involving a potential smuggling ring — and much more. This year, his dedicated team of designers, manufacturers, and other artists and specialists is responsible for creating the CrossFit Games medals that will be awarded to the top athletes in the Sport of Fitness.
Cristaux was founded 14 years ago, born of Janus’ disappointment at the various tokens he had received over the years to commemorate his achievements. He recalled a moment early in his career when he closed a multimillion-dollar deal for a company and received a “cheesy award” at a President's Club awards ceremony in the Bahamas in recognition of his success.
“I'll never forget that void that I felt when I was going back to my table,” he said.
Janus later got into investment banking, where the lackluster awards and recognition products followed him — products made of yellow plastic and other cheap materials that were a far cry from the materials he would eventually use with Cristaux.
“Any time you put together a deal of sorts, you essentially commemorate the lawyers, the bankers, the businesses that were all involved … and create a type of memento as a commemorative (award). But what I couldn't believe is just how poorly they were made. They were just tasteless,” he explained.
Janus knew he could do better. He never wanted another award recipient to feel “that missing void that I had,” he said.
So, 14 years ago, Janus created his own company and started designing the kinds of custom awards and recognition products he would have liked to receive.
“At the time, I just meant to have Cristaux be more of a creative agency similar to, I guess, how you'd have a bunch of web designers or creatives working together in a creative space,” he said. “But eventually, as the designs got more intricate, we eventually filled out a manufacturing facility.”
Now, the company does most of its manufacturing in Elk Grove Village, just northwest of Chicago in the largest industrial park in North America, and due to its dedication to quality, Cristaux also outsources some of its work to specialists around the world.
“It's crazy to think about,” Janus said, reflecting on the growth of the company. “I mean, I started practically right out of college, but we work with probably about 60 percent of the Fortune 500 companies, a ton of different celebrity events, international clients all over the world, and it's blossomed into something really cool. But at Cristaux, we're a group nerdy creatives obsessed with design, manufacturing, and the art of storytelling!”
One of Janus’ biggest deals in recent years came from that familiar feeling of disappointment that fueled his creation of Cristaux. A self-professed foodie, he recalled visiting a well-known, award-winning restaurant in Chicago. When he saw the restaurant’s many James Beard awards prominently displayed, he was dismayed at the quality. Once again he knew he could do better, so he reached out to the James Beard Foundation and said, “We'd love to come up with something that just kind of tells your story a little bit better.”
In the end, his redesign was well received, and the rest is history. Next year, Janus and his team will supply special commemorative medallions to help the foundation celebrate its 30-year anniversary — which actually occurred in 2020, though the black-tie gala that was planned has been postponed due to the pandemic.
Of course, not every deal has gone as smoothly. In 2014 he received a request from Anheuser-Busch “to create beer bottles melted out of 18-karat gold bars” as mementos for the FIFA World Cup. When Janus ran the numbers, he found each bottle would take about a half a million dollars to produce. The plan was scaled back and the bottles were molded of other metals and then dipped in gold — but enough gold to alert the Brazilian airport authorities when Janus tried to bring them into the country. Janus was eventually able to convince the authorities he wasn’t, in fact, trying to smuggle gold into Brazil, but he almost missed the World Cup.
Regardless of how smoothly the process goes, Janus prides himself on forging strong connections with the brands his company represents.
“We will not touch projects for the sake of just money,” Janus said. “It has to be, as we say, brand-centric.”
In Janus’ mind, his company is in the storytelling business. When he reached out to CrossFit, he did so out of a profound respect for the brand’s reputation as a global leader in the fitness space. He and his team made an effort to capture the spirit of the Sport of Fitness in the designs they produced for this year’s Games medallions.
Cristaux’s creative team of four engineers and 12 designers did their research and came up with about 25 different designs.
“We wanted to offer you guys different perspectives,” he said.
And while the team put together an array of options, the designs had a common theme.
“We ended up, first off, drawing upon inspiration from the weights in a gym, and so we ended up creatively engineering based upon that,” Janus explained.
Once the design was selected, Cristaux produced molds for the medals — with much of the mold work taken on by artists working by hand — and then an 800-lb. block of steel was fed into the diecast machines, pumping out medallions like cookies.
Next, the medals were carefully cleaned, polished, and then electroplated with two different finishes of black plating — one glossy and one matte — cured directly into the metal.
“The medals are quite heavy,” Janus said. “They look like a barbell … and I think the design was a little atypical, which is kind of our style.”
All told, Cristaux produced about 120 medals for this year’s CrossFit Games. The entire process, from design to approval to manufacturing and refining to shipping, took between 90 and 120 days.
Janus was pleased with how the medals turned out.
“I am enamored with storytelling. I love seeing cool brands with incredibly accomplished people, and we kind of live in that fulcrum space of designing and manufacturing and trying to craft their story together.”
Cristaux’s medals will help tell the story of the 2021 NOBULL CrossFit Games, and the artistry and attention to detail that went into producing the medallions is befitting of the CrossFit Games podium. Now we just have to wait and see who will get to wear them.
Watch the Games starting Monday, July 27, on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and games.crossfit.com to find out.
To learn more about Cristaux, visit www.Cristaux.com.
To learn see who wins the medals, tune in to the CrossFit Games starting Tuesday, July 27.
All photos courtesy of Andre Janus and Cristaux