INFO
Amstel pin
1920-1940
metal, enamel
5.5 x 1 cm
and
Button
Plastic, metal
0.5 x 5.5 cm
A for Amstel
The design of this enamelled pin for the lapel of a jacket is definitely elegant. The pin dates back to the period between the two World Wars, when men still wore hats and caps and all women dressed in knee-length skirts.
The emblem is stylishly designed in a stately royal blue. By the way, you can still find a similarly stylised A in the marble mosaic floor of the old Amstel headquarters on Mauritskade – now the fashion division of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.
Save or win
This building was designed around 1930, roughly the same period as the pin. With two gentlemen from noble families as its founders, Amstel was then still a real 'gentlemen's' beer brand. Home consumption of Amstel beer was just getting off the ground in the Netherlands. To boost sales through shops, Amstel deployed all kinds of enticements. Perhaps consumers were saving points for this pin, or it was one of the prizes in a competition. Simply giving away items at the time of purchase, as happens now in supermarkets, was unthinkable back then.
A for anarchy
The button with the (now red and white) Amstel logo and the text ‘Krek Wak Wou’ dates from half a century later. The phenomenon, a cheap aluminium disc with a printed image on paper under a protective plastic layer, originated in the 1980s. They had the names of punk, reggae, new wave, and pop artists on them, but mostly catchy slogans: ‘Ban the Bomb,’ ‘Nuclear No Thanks!’ or the A for anarchy. Young people at the time sometimes covered their entire jackets with them.
From gentlemen to young people
Companies eagerly embraced the button as a means of conveying advertising slogans. 'Krek wak wou’ is Brabant dialect for 'Just what I wanted'; most likely this button has something to do with Carnival. Since then, both Heineken and Amstel have offered a long list of promotional items, with the focus shifting from pins to headwear - more visible at football matches. Saving and winning still happens, but the value of the items increased along with consumer expectations. While in the 1990s consumers were still satisfied with a CD crate, recently Heineken gave the winner of the 0.0 competition a professional Vuelta racing bike.