A commitment to craft, set in stone

A business isn’t built on a single decision. It’s built on a strong foundation, and the tools that keep shaping it, one decision at a time. At Mercury, we consider the tools a foundation in and of themselves; an opportunity to make the instrument as intentional as all the thinking that drives its use. As the team prepared to unveil the latest and largest upgrade to the IO card* — full of spend management features built alongside it — we started wondering what it would mean to treat a card as a craft object. What if it could reflect the integrity of an artistic process in how it looked, what it was made from, and how it was made?

We started exploring this idea at its most elemental: material. Stone kept coming up — solid, load-bearing, a literal foundation. “The early brainstorming was very open-ended and conceptual. We [even] considered whether we might be able to make the card partly out of stone,” says Serena Eom, senior brand designer at Mercury, though developmental constraints ended up nixing that idea. 

But while looking into potential collaborators, Nkosana Moyo, senior brand marketer at Mercury, came across western Massachusetts-based ceramicist Simone Bodmer-Turner, who is known for her biomorphic forms that are raw and restrained on the surface, but full of presence. “Simone’s design language matched ours, and it was an instant fit.”

Simone acknowledges that she found the brief a bit “unusual” (albeit also exciting and intriguing) at first— to build a sculpture whose fundamental purpose would be to be “transposed onto a much smaller object.” The piece had to work on two levels at once: it needed enough texture and dimensionality to survive that transposition intact, and it needed to hold up as an idea, not just an image.

Working together, the Mercury team and Simone considered how they could potentially simulate the texture of stone on the card itself. “We wanted to replicate the physical dips and valleys of Simone’s three-dimensional work on the flat surface of the card,” Serena says, creating a tactile reminder of the IO card as a strong foundation every time someone held it. To create that effect, Simone would use sculpture clay with a lot of sand in it, and intentionally leave it unpolished to emphasize the gritty, tactile surface of her sculptural work— a finish that feels highly reminiscent of stone.

The biggest technical challenge was reproducing that stone-like texture within the tolerances of a card — itself subject to a strict minimum and maximum thickness — that still had to swipe, tap, and survive daily life. Early tests leaned on lamination and die-cut plates, forging a template, then stamping the texture directly onto the plastic. The samples came back close, but not quite right: the texture fell flat.

The team eventually landed on a premium printing process developed with card manufacturer Thales, where the card is coated in a first layer of resin that essentially recreates textures of three-dimensional objects. The image is then printed on top of that resin bed; with Simone’s work, raised areas would line up with highlights in the artwork, and the darker parts would be a bit depressed. 

“Initially, we were just taking iPhone photos of previous sculptures to see what might translate,” says Simone. “I was genuinely impressed by the depth they were able to achieve. That became the thread we held onto. Even though the material [of the card] itself couldn’t change, we could still create something that conveyed texture, depth, and the feeling of a handmade object.”

With the printing pieces sorted, Simone could get to sculpting. Working from her home studio, which occupies the third floor of her 19th-century farmhouse in Pioneer Valley, the hollowed-out form gradually took shape. “The sculpture draws from the ceramic tools I use every day,” Simone says, “forms that are often kidney-shaped or defined by negative space and expand them into something much larger. That connected naturally with Mercury’s own thinking about money as a tool for building businesses.”

After Simone single-fired the piece — her usual process for unglazed sculptures —  a photography team traveled to the studio to shoot it. The card only offered so much real estate, so the team needed a crop that packed in the most visual depth and variation possible — a tight, full-bleed close-up on the area of the sculpture with the greatest range between highs and lows. The darkest part of the image was mapped to sit beneath the chip reader; the areas with the most texture were positioned where a thumb would naturally land.

As a final touch, the same texture carried through to the packaging, where the box reveals the rest of the sculpture the card was cut from.

“I’ve never seen a card quite like this before," Simone says, "and I was excited to help bring something like it into the world. To me, it represents the way Mercury is thinking beyond what’s expected, not only in the design of the card, but in the way it’s approaching banking* more broadly.”

The finished product’s form draws from tools; its material, from strong foundations. We hope it reminds founders that money, handled with intention, is a tool for building — same as any instrument in an artist’s studio. And, in your hands, it’s a tool for shaping what comes next.

Our special-edition Simone Bodmer-Turner IO cards are created in collaboration with Thales. Packaging is designed by OOOOAAAA Studio and produced by Petra & Holum.

*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC. The IO Card is issued by Patriot Bank, N.A., Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard International Incorporated.