In 2009 New Zealand hosted the Rugby World Cup and overnight everyone in the country went from loving rugby to loving rugby a little bit more.
Adidas decided that if you loved the All Blacks you should be able to have your name printed on the shirt worn by hopefully the Captain of the world cup winning All Black. Sadly as we all know, France spoiled the party for the All Blacks. Nevertheless Richie McCaw did actually wear an All Black jersey where the names of hundreds of thousands of fans had been laser etched into the thread used to weave the jersey.
In order to collect those hundreds of thousands of names we needed a website, but it needed to be a little bit special – to communicate to those hundreds of thousands of fans exactly what the idea was. And so we built a site that rendered a microscopic view of a thread within a jersey. A site where every fan could add their name and see where their name was going to be etched into history.
The website won a bunch of awards at the time because it really was quite cutting edge! But you’ll have to trust me – it was built in Flash and nobody likes that any more.
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