MediWear

The brief

MediWear makes medical ID pendants. The front is white enamel with a medical symbol a paramedic will recognise. The back is engraved with whatever the wearer wants them to know: a name, a condition, an allergy, someone to call.

MediWear is a London family business run by Meko's founder, so this one was designed and built in-house. It began with a question from a grandmother, after a friend's husband was taken to hospital with nothing on him to say who he was: what if that's me one day?

Most medical IDs look clinical, and a pendant that looks clinical ends up in a drawer. So the shop had to sell the pendant as jewellery first. It also had two audiences to serve at once: older people choosing one for themselves, and the sons, daughters and grandchildren buying one for a parent.

The approach

The palette is warm rather than clinical: paper cream, a deep brown-black and the gold of the MW mark. Headings are set in Newsreader and text in Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, a typeface drawn for readers with low vision. Body text starts large, and a control at the top of every page makes it larger again, remembered from page to page.

The homepage explains the pendant in the order a paramedic would meet it: the front, the back, and the record that an NHS number opens. Every page carries a phone number, and every pendant can be ordered by phone, for anyone who would rather talk to a person.

The 3D preview

Engraving is the step people worry about. Will it fit, will it look right, is it spelled correctly? So each pendant page has a 3D model of the real pendant, and the customer's words appear on the back as they type: up to four lines, with a check before anything goes in the basket. The pendant can be dragged round, flipped between front and back, or left to turn slowly on its own.

Each model is compressed to a few hundred kilobytes and only loads as the personaliser comes into view, so the rest of the page never waits for it.

What shipped

A hand-built shop with a page for each of the three pendants, a basket, card payments through Stripe, and guides on what to engrave and buying for someone else. Each pendant page has a gallery of the piece photographed on velvet, on wood and being worn, plus a short unboxing film. Orders and call-back requests are emailed straight to the business, and the privacy, cookie and medical information pages were written as part of the build.