Udder Insanity Sends Public over the Moon
SAGCE has adapted CowParade concept to coinage to become the first full colour gold bullion.
CowParade, as it is known today throughout the world, was officially born in 1999, in Zurich Switzerland. Gerry Elbaum, a former attorney in Hartford, Connecticut, was so taken with it that he secured the rights and formed CowParade Holdings Corporation and used a major event in Chicago to create the CowParade brand and distinctive logo.
Elbaum did not at that time have a sense of the global span and impact which this endeavour would have in just a few short years. While the Chicago event was ongoing, he was contacted by a prominent individual from New York City who wanted to bring the event to that city.
On a November afternoon in 1999, Elbaum and Rudy Giuliani, then Mayor of New York, announced that CowParade would be one of the city’s major events during its millennium year celebration.
The New York event opened with almost 500 cows positioned in several of the travelled venues of all five boroughs of the city. It was the first time in the history of New York that an event of this kind had been staged city-wide.
The live auction of the cows began with the Mayor’s cow fetching $20 000. The rest of the 60 cows went under the hammer in the next hour and half. The proceeds that evening totalled over $1.2 million which went to various charities selected by the City. Many of the remaining cows were sold via CowParade Internet Auction and brought in an additional $1 million. The highest price paid for a single cow was $65 000, which was paid for an extraordinary piece of art created by a completely unknown artist at the time.
The New York event established the momentum for what is a total global phenomenon today. Mayor Giuliani said that the exhibit was the singular event of the City’s millennium year and, in his end of the year address, stated that upward of 44 million people saw the cows. No one actually was counting, but the numbers of people who visited New York expressly to see these bovines were huge.
The global publicity propelled the CowParade public art concept into the international limelight.
It was time for the cows to cross the pond and in 2002 the Queen played a key role in CowParade London 2002. A golden cow with her crown painted in the royal colour was created to celebrate her 50 years on the throne and placed for viewing at Buckingham Palace.
The London CowParade, like the one in New York, served to bring CowParade to the attention of the world. Tens of new inquiries were received from virtually every corner of the globe. More than 7 000 cows, which have appeared in over 60 cities and venues, followed London.
The South African Gold Coin Exchange (SAGCE) secured the license to use the CowParade designs after they appeared in South Africa in 2004. The SAGCE was pleasantly amazed by the funky and colourful concept, and it was around that time that they introduced the Scoin Project and were looking for fun and colourful designs to put on their new Scoin coins.
The ingredients making up the recipe comprise:
• A $200 face value one-ounce gold legal tender coin with Queen Elizabeth II on the one side;
• A full-colour impression of an aspect of a CowParade International cow on the other;
• Part of the sale proceeds earmarked for a worthy cause which in the local context has led to a tie up with CHOC;
• Catchy pay-off lines like “buy a cash cow” and “a new brand way of investing in gold” and “colour your world with gold”;
• Severely limited mintages;
• A new name “Scoin” that we hope will emulate the highly successful Swatch watch brand; and
• Purchased and installed cows displayed in each of the Scoin shops.
Alan Demby, executive chairman of the South African Gold Coin Exchange (SAGCE), says the reason for going to the great lengths of ensuring that the coin was classified as legal tender was to achieve an international status such that it can be imported into any country free of taxes and VAT.
“But it is the other side of the coin – so to speak – that is considerably more interesting. Here we did a deal with CowParade International, which has staged some 50 cow parades in shopping precincts worldwide – an initiative that has rendered the CowParade cow instantly recognisable in most of the western world.
Demby notes that the CowParade management hopes to stage a massive parade, involving 1 000 different cows, for the 2008 Beijing Olympics; that to date more than 7 000 cows, each with a different design created by different pop artists, have been promoted.
Ultimately after the cows are displayed in the streets, they are sold and parts of the proceeds go to a local charity.
“Most coins celebrate an event, a person or an aspect of a country’s heritage – the Queen, Princess Diana, and the Battle of Trafalgar. What we have done is completely iconoclastic in terms of coins,” says Demby. “In a nutshell, we are trying to make coin ownership fun and funky.
“Importantly, each coin has a maximum mintage of 100 – so you’re combining gold with rarity.
“We’ve created our own branded bullion coin. There’s much potential in the foreign market, given especially that the US has staged some 15 cow parades and the UK four – hence a high level of awareness, representing an exciting potential market for the Scoins, which are currently selling at R15 000.”
Embellishing on the Swatch/Scoin analogy, Demby says that just as Swatch is a fun watch, so Scoin is a fun coin. With gold reading $1000 an ounce, this opens up a whole new world of gold buyers – so watch out for Scoin!
“Few are aware that there’s a collector’s book on Swatch watches. People actually collect them. Swatch came up with the idea of making the core of the watch the same; it was only the outsides that differed, which meant they were able to mass produce the watches cheaply.
“That’s what we’ve done with Scoins. Normally, to make a coin takes about two years. You need to create a design, submit it to government for approval, after which Parliament must then vote before the coin can be minted.”
To short-circuit the whole process, SAGCE conceived a universal coin with the Queen on the one side and is blank on the other. This renders the coin capable of being mass produced on a just-in-time basis, since the pictures for the blank side of the coin capable of being printed in just four weeks.
“So you can bring a Scoin coin to market in the space of four weeks, versus two years.”
Scoin coins can only be bought from Scoin shops, highlighting Demby’s insistence that his company owns its own brand.
An additional Scoin dimension is for a corporation to build its brand into the Scoin design – as, for example, Dis-Chem has done with its Dis-cow-nt Mooti, Cell C with the Verligde Koei, and Momentum with Moomentum. The Scoin can then be given to the organisation’s top stakeholders.
In South Africa, the charitable beneficiary of Cow Parade is the Children Cancer Foundation of SA (CHOC).
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