- People always ask, "Chris, why are the rings so big?"
There is a little bit of a factor of,
how can my ring be a little bigger than the one before?
That ring has over 400 diamonds in it.
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Chris Poitras, vice president and chief operating officer
for Jostens Sports and College division.
Jostens, as you an see, has been honored,
we have created 35 of the 53 Super Bowl rings,
starting with the first Super Bowl ring
for Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers,
going all the way through last year's Super Bowl ring
for the New England Patriots, their sixth.
Jostens has been around 124 years.
Founded here in Owatonna, Minnesota,
and now corporate headquartered in Minneapolis.
If it's a high school graduation, a college graduation,
a Super Bowl championship, a Stanley Cup championship,
whatever it may be, Jostens is there to help them celebrate.
When the two, AFL and the old NFL merged,
the first Super Bowl ring was created
for the Green Bay Packers.
The tradition has just evolved into what it is today
which the memento for that athlete to celebrate
the entire year.
And the emotion that comes out of these athletes
when they receive these is one of the most
spectacular things you'll ever be part of.
You can see the brotherhood that they connect
with these folks.
You can see the blood, the sweat, the tears
that they go through.
And if you watch any sort of a sporting event tonight,
it's the athletes chasing the ring.
They're saying, "I wanna win the ring."
For us it's about becoming the storyteller of champions.
How do we help that team tell the unique story
of their entire season on a ring,
and using every single nook, cranny, technique that we can
to capture that story?
The unique part about the first ring,
obviously for Vince Lombardi,
and it kinda goes a little bit into the second ring,
the Packers actually won the championship the year before
the first Super Bowl.
If you look at the second Super Bowl ring
it has three stones on it.
That was their third championship.
So a lot of people say, "Why is there three stones
"on the top of the second Super Bowl ring?"
Jostens had an ongoing relationship
because we helped them celebrate their World Championship
before the merger of the two leagues.
When that first Super Bowl happened,
our designer, Ken Westerland,
actually worked directly with Vince Lombardi
to create this ring,
signified by a one caret stone on the top of the ring.
And if you look closely, around the ring,
it actually is a globe,
and that's bringing the two worlds together
for the first true world championship ring of the NFL.
It's a spectacular piece from the perspective
of the history to it,
but you can see its simplicity.
They were giving out 75 to 100 rings,
and it was really the players, the coaches,
and then anybody else that was in the organization.
And that part of the tradition
has remained fairly consistent throughout time.
The thing that's changed,
is every part of the organizations has grown.
You're looking at organizations gifting rings
anywhere from 500 to 2,000 rings.
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People always ask, "Chris, why are the rings so big?"
There are many reasons for it.
There is a little bit of a factor of,
"How can my ring be a little bigger than the one before?"
You look at that one, that ring has over 400 diamonds in it.
So you're going from one diamond to 400
and over 10 carets worth of genuine stones.
Truly a spectacular piece.
But that's really the evolution.
And there is also the aspect of the athlete.
The athlete has become so much bigger.
And me putting that ring on my finger it looks humongous.
The rest of the athletes are so much bigger
than the generally population that it doesn't look as big,
but it's still humongous.
That's the largest championship ring ever made.
The New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers
both have six Super Bowl rings in their history.
The Patriots logo is on all six of them,
and then the Lombardi trophy was also on all six.
You got more and more and more challenging
for us as we went on from one to two to three,
to their fourth, their fifth,
all the way to the sixth Super Bowl,
which required the ring to grow a little bit
in order to fit those six iconic Lombardi trophies
on the top of that ring.
This is Pittsburgh Steelers sixth Super Bowl ring also.
Jostens has produced five of their six Super Bowl rings.
Six round stones representing
the six Super Bowl championships with the blue sapphire,
the red ruby,
and the gold stone representing their three colors.
Most athletes wear it on their right hand ring finger.
You've had a couple here and there
that have done pinkie rings.
It really depends on the athlete.
This is a replica of William The Refrigerator Perry's ring.
So this ring here is the largest Super Bowl ring size
ever created.
It was first created at a size 25,
and then it was resized up to a size 27.
It is still, based on our knowledge,
the largest Super Bowl ring ever created.
Tom Brady, there's no other athlete in the NFL
that has six Super Bowl rings other than Tom Brady.
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Majority of the rings are made
with either yellow or white gold,
and then genuine diamonds depending on the logo,
then there are colored stones,
where they would be rubies and sapphires,
and then custom, what we call corundums,
which are man-made stones that are made specifically
to match an identical PMS color for an organization.
We worked with the Packers in order to produce
the only Super Bowl ring that was made in platinum.
Platinum is a very unique material.
It's a very hard material.
There are avenues of it that are more challenging
to manufacture with,
and you can do different things with.
Then, obviously, there's a cost attribute of platinum.
Platinum is a very expensive metal.
So you have the team side,
and you have the organization side.
But every single ring will be personalized
to an individual of the organization,
no matter the level of the person.
You think about the first Super Bowl ring,
really it's the top,
and then it's a left shank and a right shank.
That's really what was used in the first Super Bowl ring.
When you look at the Philadelphia Eagles' ring,
you have the top of the ring,
you have the left shank, you have the right shank,
you have areas above the panels,
you have an arbor inside the ring,
you have the palm side area,
a personal signature of every single player
under the palm.
Every single aspect of this ring
is like a blank canvas for us.
This ring in particular is just laden with stories.
This was such a unique championship
for the Philadelphia Eagles.
It was their first Super Bowl championship.
They had won championships prior to the AFL and the NFL
coming together, which they have four stones,
which are the four total world champions, on the corners.
Then they have the one Lombardi trophy for this year's,
right, trophy.
And if you remember that Super Bowl
there was a play that they ran for a touchdown.
Nick Foles, the quarterback, caught the ball in the endzone,
versus threw the ball to either the running back
or the tight end.
The numbers of those three players
after the center touched it were 127.
So they called that play, The Philly Special.
There are 127 stones lifting up the logo
to celebrate that iconic play.
On the shank you have Nick Foles' number in diamonds.
On the bottom of their ring they have their fight song,
"Fly Eagles Fly,"
and that's just to pay homage and tribute to their fans.
And then inside the ring also you'll see,
what we call an inside arbor.
So this isn't an engraving,
this is actually something that we build
into the ring itself.
And you have all of the opponents and the scores
of the games that they won in the playoff.
Each of the playoff games they wore the Underdog,
and the dog masks became very prominent.
One of their offensive linemen put a dog mask on
after a victory.
To pay tribute to the organization,
only on the player's rings did they put a dog mask
on the inside of the ring to be able to show that.
Probably the most challenging part is the stones themselves,
both in the setting of the stones and also the color.
Jeffrey Lurie of the Philadelphia Eagles,
who was just spectacular to work.
The color of the precious,
genuine green sapphires was really important to him.
That color had to be perfect.
I wanna say that our team did anywhere from 10
to 12 different colors of green sapphires
in order to get to the exact color that he wanted
in that logo.
And when you get into reds and blues and things like that,
it can be a little bit easier,
but when you get into orange stones for the Denver Broncos,
those become a little bit more.
You need to find 1,200 stones that are identical in color
is a feat in itself.
We source from all over the world.
We take a great, great deal of pride to make sure
that every single ring is authentic.
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The process starts long before a team wins a championship.
So our design team are thinking about
how are all these logos made.
What can we do that's unique?
How can we capture their logo?
And then also, what are the stories?
What are the nuggets of information
that a team may want to celebrate?
So that process really starts
immediately following the Super Bowl
and will go almost until April.
Last year for the Patriots,
I wanna say that we went through 13 different samples
before we got to the final sample.
Once we're done, and they say "That's the ring,"
we'll retain all the other rings,
and then we actually remove all the stones,
and we melt the samples down.
This isn't easy.
We have an engine of people
and a team that's dedicated to doing this.
We have multiple facilities throughout North America
that will help us execute in producing 1,300 rings
for the New England Patriots in six weeks.
When we're setting stones for the New England Patriots,
we're setting close to 200,000 stones by hand
within six weeks.
And then you have the polishing folks,
then the finishing folks.
So we'll have about 48 people
who will touch that ring individually
at one point or another.
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Because of the merger of the old AFL and NFL,
that tradition has remained that the teams receive
a AFC or NFC championship ring.
It's a little bit different, a little bit smaller in scale,
but I wanna say of the 53 league championship rings,
Jostens has created 50 of them.
It's kind of an honor of ours to be able to create those
and help those teams.
Last year we did the Los Angeles Rams.
Obviously it doesn't get the visibility
and the glamor that the Super Bowl ring would get,
but there's only two teams that make it all the way
to the Super Bowl,
and helping them celebrate in a small way,
it would take a great deal of pride.
We put just as much time and effort and craftsmanship
into that as we do the Super Bowl rings.
Because we know that those athletes worked just as hard.
May not be as big, it may not be as gaudy,
it may not be as blingy,
but it is still a one-off ring created from scratch
by our team.
So we put a lot of pride into that.
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Class rings actually started at West Point,
celebrating the pinnacle of college career at West Point.
That, obviously,
evolved into celebrating high school experiences.
In the early 1900s,
athletes were celebrated with some sort of memento.
You look back through history,
there are many, many different things that they did
on watches, to pocket lavalieres,
to just a whole host of things.
As time evolved into the '20s and '30s,
the ring culture started actually in baseball.
And then as you get into the '50s
it becomes much more prominent.
Any ring that we have comes with a lifetime warranty.
So we guarantee craftsmanship, the products,
the materials for its lifetime.
It's amazing the stories that we have
that come back to our customer service organization
that say cars run over them,
have been dropped in the dishwasher.
We have a huge vaults within some of our facilities
that keep the tools and the dies,
anything that we need to be able to produce
those rings going all the way back.
And this is something that they passed down
for generations to generations.
We still get people who call us around,
their great-grandfather, or their grandfather,
or their father,
and they have the Super Bowl ring,
and they need to get it cleaned,
or they need to get it fixed,
going all the way back into the '50s and the '60s.
These things have become the iconic piece
that the athlete has.
The team will keep the Lombardi trophy,
and they'll have that in their display cases,
but this is what the team, the owners, the league,
gives as their gift to the players,
and they're able to celebrate with their family.
We always say that the next ring that we make
has to be the best ring that we've ever created.
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