Deal toys

A deal toy (also deal gift, lucite tombstone or financial tombstone) is a customized memento or gift that is intended to mark and commemorate the closing of a business deal in finance or investment banking. These plaques or other types of trophies are typically presented at the closing ceremony or dinner to the issuer and senior third-party advisers of the major financial transactions as a souvenir.

The deal toy is the marriage of a design with the tombstone advertisement, a term that dates to the late 19th century, when printers used it to refer to "column-width newspaper ads run without any illustration or typographical ornamentation,". After the crash of 1929, the Securities Act of 1933 placed strict requirements on the advertisements that banks were allowed to run. Those restrictions meant that the tombstone ad became the format that companies and banks used to publicize financial transactions such as initial public offerings. From at least the late 1960s, law firms and banks produced Lucite slabs that encased the tombstone ads announcing new partner classes. By the late 1960s, banks were commemorating their new partner classes by embedding the partnership announcements in Lucite. The first deal toy was created in the early 1970s. A second world war buff, Mr. McDonald stumbled upon Lucite as the optimal material for crafting deal toys, as it was easy to tool and available in large, cheap quantities after being used for years to make bullet-proof glass for combat planes.

Despite having reservations about whether bulge-bracket banks would be interested in his wares, Mr. McDonald says most of them were surprisingly “enthusiastic”, since buying the more traditional high-end client gifts from places like Tiffany’s was seen as prohibitively expensive. Don retired in 1984 and sold the family business to his two sons, who kept their headquarters in New York City. In 2009 Altrum Group was founded to bring together 3 leading deal gift companies: Don McDonald Group, Icon Recognition, and Gifted Portfolio.

The Corporate Presence, Admento and Buttonwood are other deal toy companies focusing on Lucite tombstones.

As a result of the banking crisis of 2008, investment banks closed fewer deals, and deal toy budgets were reined in accordingly. With an increase in deal-making activity in early 2013, many deal toy design firms reported a corresponding upsurge in both the number and size of orders. A recently cited example of the resurgence of the deal toy is the one commemorating the landmark initial public offering of Facebook, designed by the New York-based firm, The Corporate Presence.

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