🔧 Labor Day Closure | 🚧 Parking Lot Closed 9/16-18 | 📖 New Catalog | 🏅 Fall Sports

Our parking lot is finally getting repaved! It has been more than twenty years since the last time, so this one is well overdue.

The lot is closed Wednesday, September 16 through Friday, September 18. Crews work through the weekend, and everything should be back to normal Monday, September 21.

We are still open. Regular hours, 8 AM to 5 PM, phones on, orders moving. The only thing changing is that there is nowhere to park.

So a favor: if you can avoid coming by those three days, please do.

We are grateful they offered, so we would rather not overwhelm them either. Hence the ask.

It will be loud and messy for a few days, and then we will have a lot that is safe, smooth, and so much nicer to look at!

We have put together an online catalog you can flip through like a real book. No download, no account, just click and browse.

It covers our main product lines with current pricing, so you can look through ideas and compare options. It works on a phone or a computer, and it is easy to pass along to whoever else needs to weigh in.

One honest note: it is still growing. What is published now is a starting point, not the whole picture. We carry thousands of products and the catalog shows a curated slice. If you see something close to what you want but not quite right, ask. There is almost always a version in a different size, material, color, or price point.

Fall sports are underway, and end-of-season banquets arrive faster than anyone expects. If you are organizing awards for a team, league, school, or conference, now is a good time to start.

Getting in early means:

On budgets: just tell us the number.

We know program budgets have been tighter the last couple of years. We would much rather build something that fits than have you scale back your recognition program or go hunting online. With thousands of products across every price point, there is almost always a way to hit a number without giving up quality. Trophies, plaques, medals, ribbons, custom pieces, we mix and match until the math works.

If your usual selection is not feasible this year, call us first. That conversation is one of the things we are best at.

We recently added our certifications and memberships to our website, and it occurred to us that plenty of our long-time customers have never seen them.

Capital Trophy is certified through COBID, the State of Oregon’s Certification Office for Business Inclusion and Diversity, as a Women Business Enterprise, an Emerging Small Business, and an Oregon Small Business Enterprise. We are also a member of the Awards and Personalization Association and both the Salem Area and Stayton Sublimity Chambers of Commerce.

If your organization has supplier diversity goals, or you work for a public agency with small business or diverse supplier spending targets, work you place with us can count toward them. If your purchasing department needs our certification details for a vendor file, just ask.

And a few things that are not on any badge: women owned and veteran owned, locally owned, right here in Salem since 1993.

I want to start with a thank you.

Back in the spring we asked for your votes in the Best of the Willamette Valley awards. We did not place this year, and honestly, that is just fine. The categories we were nominated in covered the entire valley and every kind of business in it, so the field was enormous. Long odds for a small awards shop on 12th Street.

What stuck with me was how many of you actually went and voted, some of you every day for weeks. People I have known for years, people I have never met in person. That meant considerably more to me than the result would have. So thank you!!

Now an update on what we’ve been doing behind the scenes:

Last year was our first full year on the new business system we spent two years building toward, and it worked. Orders, quoting, scheduling, and customer records all live in one place now, and after a genuinely rough first few months, everything was functional. That being said I spent the second half of the year simply adjusting to everything while still working on fixing issues.

This year has been about the unglamorous other half of that job: fine-tuning it and cleaning up all the hacked “fixes” I implemented last year to get us by. There is a real difference between a system that works and a system that fits, and closing that gap has taken most of 2026. Almost none of it is visible from the outside, which is sort of the point. When it is right, you just get your order faster with fewer things going sideways.

What I underestimated was how much of the year it would take. The online store and the showroom refresh both moved slower than I planned back in January. I am not going to put new dates on either one, because I have learned my lesson there. What I will say is that the groundwork is the exact thing that makes both possible, and it is close to finished.

The parking lot is getting fixed after twenty years. There is finally a catalog you can browse. The system is finally ours. A lot of this year’s work does not photograph well, but it counts.

Thank you for sticking with us!