05 Aug Design Awards – from the beginning to now

Bruce Dodds, CEO of Design Awards, founded the company in 1994 and has since become something of a trophy tycoon, manufacturing prizes for Toyota, The Commonwealth Bank, Marie Claire, the ARIA’s, The Communications Council and Audi  among many others. His company also makes the awards for some of reality television’s most famous competitions, such as The Great Australian Spelling Bee and NRL teams such as the Cowboys

Bruce trained as an architect and mechanical draftsman and after working in a sign making company realised that there was a gap in the market for high quality, hand crafted bespoke awards. Prestigious awards would come in bubble wrap, arrive broken, late. It was a huge inconvenience for people and companies. Bruce realised there had to be a better way.

Bruce set up his company as a small awards and trophy retail outlet based in Surry Hills. With his design expertise, attention to detail and quality craftsmanship Bruce established the company as an artisan awards manufacturer with a quality that was second to none. Bruce promised his clients that he would always personally take care of their every need and work with them to deliver new designs and manufacturing techniques to make better awards.

Through his hard work and exceptional quality awards Bruce grew the business, later  bringing his two sons into the fold and today has manufacturing operations in both Sydney and Melbourne. The company still retains the same values as it did from the very beginning with innovation, creativity and quality at the heart of everything they do.

Truely a family business Bruces’s sons James and Charles run the Melbourne and Sydney offices repectively.  Either Bruce, Charles of James is involved in every aspect of the companies design and manufacture process.  One of the distinctions of Design Awards is their willingness to go out of their way to make clients happy with examples such as producing  mock up awards for the clients to see and sourcing precious materials from overseas to hand finishing techniques such as hand filing  Audi’s length of service awards. It is for these reasons that many of Design Awards clients have been with them for over 15 years.

Committed to excellent service Design Awards pride themselves on building a strong relationship with their customers often working with them  on ideas for new projects. The efforts of Bruce, James and Charles have not gone unnoticed by clients with many recent clients such as Fox Sports and the NRL Cowboys coming to us through word of mouth referrals.