10 essential tips when entering the Dame Design Awards

DAME Design Awards non-voting secretary Kim Hollamby provides helpful pointers and clarifies potentially incorrect assumptions for those entering this world-renowned celebration of marine equipment design.

1: It’s not just about innovation
The DAME Design Awards is not just about completely new marine equipment concepts that have never been seen before. It is focused more broadly on identifying and rewarding excellent end-to-end design practices that make boating more accessible, pleasurable, and sustainable for the industry’s customers. It encourages marine manufacturers to improve efficiency and match the very best design experiences from sectors like automotive, luxury goods and smart technologies.

Genuinely innovative market-disruptive products will always catch the attention of jury members. However, the incremental design improvement of equipment that boaters have used for decades is equally appreciated.

Your entry should guide the Jury towards the design background of your entry. If you believe it is a genuine first, explain why and how you developed it. If it is the next generation of a product that you already placed on the market years before, outline the iterative design steps taken to make it better.

2 The size of your company and complexity of your product doesn’t matter
More than three decades of DAME Design Awards overall winning entries offer evidence of incredible variety, from €30 lifejacket lights and a safety hook to high-end deck equipment, complex marine electronics, propulsion, and other systems. The list of successful entrants features every size of operation from start-ups and micro and small businesses to big name companies with large R&D budgets.

Never think your business is too small or your product too simple to be considered.

3: Draw the Jury’s attention to your product’s strengths
The DAME Design Awards wants to highlight excellent design in all aspects, but the Jury is pragmatic enough to understand that each product will have specific strengths. Winning products may be flawed in some areas, but the jury will be looking for the best blend of design disciplines and outstanding examples of any of those aspects when making its final decisions.

Your entry should highlight the strongest design merits of your submitted products, in clear language with fact-based statements. It might help when writing your submission to think and explain how it addresses the following design facets:

Styling
Construction
Functionality
Fulfilment of purpose
Ease of use
Ease of installation (if applicable)
Sustainability
Originality
Innovation
Interoperability (where applicable)
Price versus performance
 

4 Understand what the jury needs from you
A DAME Design Awards entry field typically comprises 100-130 products, a lot for the jury to examine. What you submit in your entry may determine how quickly the judges understand your product. You can make a difference by submitting a well-prepared entry containing all the critical information the jury needs to know, backed by facts and evidence-based statements and inclusions.

Remember, jury members are all from qualified technical backgrounds and appreciate facts, not marketing language when assessing products.

5: Access resources to help guide your entry
Read the terms and conditions carefully. ‘Ts and Cs’ might suggest a dry read full of legal jargon, but in the case of the DAME Design Awards it’s more like a guidance document highlighting what the jury needs from you.

Look at last year’s Jury Report. The full list of nominated products is included, and the comments about winners offer some insight into the jury’s thinking. You can also gain inspiration and insight from the news items on the DAME Design Awards website.

6: Ensure your entry is in the Jury room
The DAME Design Awards jury meets one month ahead of METSTRADE for two long days of physical inspection of entries after preparing beforehand by studying written submissions and other online materials. It’s a very hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up meeting that enables jury members to appreciate the design approach of the product and even peripherals such as packaging, documents, and presentation.

Physical examination is an important part of the process. The Jury will still judge any entries that cannot be shipped – and it will pay particular attention to the written, video and photographic material and models for any entries that are too large to be present in Amsterdam. But tactile appreciation of the entries and the ability to engage with them is an invaluable part of the judging process.

The Jury does not scientifically test products. But where possible, please ensure entries are supplied so they can be displayed and powered up to examine features like user interfaces and functions that can be practically viewed in our examination spaces.

7: Be mindful of the closing date
Entries for this year’s DAME Design Awards close on 16 September. This is to enable a month-long assessment process to commence, following which the Jury will hold its two-day assessment meeting.

Please don’t leave your entry too late. Getting ahead will make for a better submission and ensure you are able to meet the essential dates for placing your product in front of the Jury.

8: Access the METSTRADE Exhibitor Portal to start your entry
The DAME Design Awards is open to all METSTRADE exhibitors. Please take the following steps to enter:

Enter the Exhibitor Portal with your exhibitor login details
Go to ‘PROMOTION’ and select ‘DAME’
Fill out the second form: DAME Design Awards
Complete the DAME participation form by clicking on ‘SAVE’

9: Please ask for help if needed
We do understand that you may need some guidance about the requirements of entry. The organising team behind the DAME Awards is easily reached by emailing [email protected]. We can assure you of a quick response for your questions.

10: Remember the potential for gaining brilliant exposure for your company
 
The DAME Design Awards is not a winner-takes-all competition. While winning outright is an understandable focus, gaining the jury’s approval at the nomination level is invaluable. All nominee products are displayed on the DAME Awards exhibition at METSTRADE, which is consistently highlighted by visitors and exhibitors as a frequently visited feature of the show. In the past 10 years, more than 500 products have been nominated and then showcased in this way.

The first round of judging is critical because this decides the list of nominated products. These are entries where the jury sees obvious design merits worthy of closer scrutiny in later rounds. Further rounds decide the Winners and Special Mentions in each category before the final discussion to identify which Category Winner will take the overall DAME Award. The jury also considers whether it has identified an exemplary product for its discretionary Environmental Design Award.

Many past nominees and winners have reported the success that DAME Design Awards recognition has brought to their business and products. We look forward to seeing your submissions this year.