Custom wood trophies for your annual awards night

Why a wood trophy for an annual awards night

Wood engraves in depth, sits well in the hand, and ages for years without peeling. Moulded resin and acrylic do not give the same result.

An award engraved in maple or walnut keeps its name for as long as the piece lasts. The line is physical, because the laser removes material instead of laying down ink. Nothing washes off in a cleaning, and nothing peels after three winters in an entrance hall.

We have machined wood in Saint-Siméon-de-Bonaventure since 1994, and we do not cast metal. Statistics Canada in fact places precious-metal trophies in a separate class, NAICS 33991. That class counted 921 Canadian businesses for the 2024 data year.

We do not resell catalogue blanks either, since the piece is made here. A trophy shop engraves an object built elsewhere, often the same one from coast to coast. We cut the piece and we engrave it under one roof, with the finishing done by hand.

The formats a CNC and laser shop produces

Four formats cover almost every awards night: the wall plaque, the block, the cut silhouette on a base, and the medallion.

The cutting happens on our 4 x 8 foot CNC, which also carves relief from 3 to 15 mm. Fine engraving then moves to the 80 W xTool P3 CO2 laser. The engraving surface measures 915 x 458 mm, and the line goes down to 0.1 mm. Each machine has its role, since the CNC hollows out and the laser marks.

We engrave maple, ash, cherry, walnut and oak on a regular basis. Bamboo holds the engraving just as well as those hardwoods do. The same pair of machines produces our machined wood business signs.

One adjacent example dates from 2026, when we delivered a Baltic birch conference lectern to a school in the Baie-des-Chaleurs. The name of the institution is engraved on the CNC, and the production chain is the same one.

Ordering a run of 10, 50 or 200 pieces

We need two things before starting: the exact list of names and a vector file of your logo.

The list comes to us in a single file, with spelling and accents checked by you. A name misspelled on an engraved piece cannot be corrected, so the piece gets made again.

The logo has to be vector (AI, EPS, SVG or vector PDF), in one colour or monochrome-ready. Strokes thinner than 0.3 mm disappear in the engraving and leave nothing on the wood. Fine gradients do not render on wood, because the grain interferes with the halftones.

Quantity changes the production method, and it changes more than the unit cost alone.

• Under ten pieces, each unit gets positioned by hand, and setup dominates the production time.
• From ten to fifty, we build a positioning jig that pays for itself once and lowers the time per piece.
• Past fifty, the 915 x 458 mm surface lets us engrave several pieces in one cycle.
• At two hundred pieces and up, raw material supply becomes the real lead time rather than the engraving.

We do not publish a lead time in days for any run. For market context, North American suppliers of engraved awards publish their own lead times. Awards.com, Viking Awards and FineAwards all do, on pages consulted in 2026. They announce five to ten business days after proof approval for a laser-engraved wood plaque. A cast bronze plaque takes five to nine weeks at the suppliers in that market. Those are their lead times, and ours gets stated in the quote, according to the run.

A named award and a year-end gift do not do the same job. The first carries a name and gets handed over in front of a room. The second gets chosen by object, in small quantity, and we cover it in our post on engraved corporate gifts.

What recognition changes, with the numbers

Good recognition lowers voluntary departures, and the figures below come from named, dated panels.

According to Gallup and Workhuman (2024), employees who received quality recognition in 2022 were less likely to have left by 2024. That gap reached 45% between the two groups the panel followed. The panel tracked roughly 3,400 employees across a two-year window.

Gallup and Workhuman study on employee recognition (2024)

According to the Achievers Workforce Institute (2025), only 23% of employees feel meaningfully recognized at work. The survey reached 3,600 employees in May 2025, which is the sample behind that figure. SHRM Labs (2024) reports 31% less turnover in organizations with a recognition program that fits. The methodology is not published, so treat that last figure as a direction.

The Canadian context gives the scale behind those recognition numbers. The Conference Board of Canada (2024) puts voluntary turnover in Canadian organizations at 5.9% in 2023. It reached a peak of 10.9% during the previous decade.

In Quebec, the occasions to hand out an award are not in short supply. The Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec (2024-2025 activity report) counts 120 affiliated chambers and represents more than 45,000 businesses. Five of those chambers cover the Gaspésie and the Îles-de-la-Madeleine. The Unité régionale de loisir et de sport Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine holds its Prix ExcÉlan loisir et sport every year.

One last point concerns the municipalities and how they award their smaller contracts. According to the Fédération québécoise des municipalités, a municipal contract under $25,000 gets awarded by mutual agreement. Several contract management by-laws also grant a numbered advantage to the local supplier. The one from the Ville de Rivière-du-Loup (2025) sets 5% under $7,500. It adds 3% from $7,501 to $25,000, at equal quality.

Frequently asked questions