Vintage 1993 Coca Cola Polar Bear Pin 🥤 NOS Always Cool Advertising Button

Always Cool? 🥤 Vintage 1993 Coca-Cola Polar Bear Pin, NOS

Size: 3" x 2"

🐻‍❄️ An original Coca‑Cola polar bear pin from the 1993 Always Coca‑Cola campaign, New Old Stock and never worn. It's a 3" × 2" rectangular pinback badge: a big friendly polar bear leaning on an ice floe with a contour bottle of Coke beside him, deep blue arctic water behind, ALWAYS COOL in tall white letters, and the red Always Coca‑Cola disc with the bottle in the middle. Along the bottom in tiny type: Coca-Cola, Coke, Always and the Distinctive Bottle are registered trade marks of Coca-Cola Ltd. The back is a black pebbled backing with the pin pushed right through it, marked Recycled Paper.

That fine print is a nice detail. Coca-Cola Ltd. is Coca-Cola's own company in Canada, headquartered in Toronto, so this pin was made for the Canadian side of the campaign.

🧊 How the polar bear became Coke's mascot

Coca-Cola had used a polar bear once before, in a French ad in 1922 - a bear sharing a bottle of Coke with the sun, captioned "Délicieuse. Rafraîchissante." - and then hardly at all for seventy years. Everything changed in 1993, when Coke launched the Always Coca-Cola campaign, and its star, first shown on TV that June, was a commercial called Northern Lights: a group of polar bears sitting in the snow watching the aurora borealis like it was a movie, each with a bottle of Coke. The creator, Ken Stewart, got the idea from his Labrador Retriever puppy, who he thought looked just like a little polar bear. The bears were brought to life with brand-new computer animation by Rhythm & Hues of Los Angeles, about twelve weeks of work for every spot, and Stewart even made the bears' sounds himself. The bears were an instant hit, went to the 1994 Winter Olympics on luge and ski jump, and have been part of Coke's holidays ever since.

A great piece of 1990s Coca‑Cola advertising from the campaign that made the polar bears famous. Once these last ones are gone they'll be very difficult to acquire. Like everything I sell, they're stored in the dark at a steady 72°F and under 40% humidity.