In October of 2017 Ledgestone TD Nate Heinold had a random thought come to his mind. He had just begun planning for the 2018 Ledgestone special disc program and he was trying to think of something to blow people away. He started to research the different kinds of bees in the world and had a thought to do several variations of bees on special Buzzzes for the event. “At first it was just a pipe dream in my mind. I honestly didn’t think Discraft would go for it because the Buzzz is their baby and messing with the bee is a tricky thing,” said Heinold.
After about a month of research he took his idea to Bob Julio, who heads up the Ledgestone/Discraft relationship. Bob liked the idea and told Nate to run with it. Nate was pleasantly surprised. After finishing his research, he had to find the most important piece of the puzzle: a designer. He talked to a few designers before settling on Les White. Les had just completed and released the Swirly Zone project, so he already had a working relationship with Discraft.
“Things came together pretty quickly with Les. He was able to meet my timeline of having something done at the end of 2017 and things moved quickly from there,” continued Heinold. Nate gave Les a document full of his research on the bees that he wanted to see designed, and a general framework for what the design should look like. The original document began with 5 bees, but Nate quickly decided to add a sixth design. “The Robo bee just made a lot of sense. That seems to be Les’ thing and I thought it would be really neat.”
At that point in time Nate hadn’t settled on a plastic combination for the discs yet. Originally his idea was going to be Colored Glo Z Buzzzes. He moved on to ESP Swirly Glo, but it was eventually decided to just do regular Swirly ESP. Les and Nate went back and forth on the designs a few times and settled on the final design for the six bees, which were the Bumble Bee, Leafcutter Bee, Killer Bee, Honey Bee, Robo Bee and Digger Bee. Nate said he tried to pick popular bees that everyone would know and that were recognizable. The list of discs were pushed out to the Ledgestone vendors with the stamp design, and they quickly became the most popular item in pre-orders that Ledgestone had ever released. “I was blown away by the demand from the vendors and how excited they were for these discs. It has been really neat to work on this project from the beginning.”
Nate recently visited the factory in early February to check on things and to finalize designs for the rest of the Ledgestone disc program. While up there Nate had the pleasure of helping create the first few Les White Buzzzes. But instead of starting on the run of Swirly ESP discs, they decided to make 60 full foil Buzzzes. “It was an awesome experience to be able to help make the full foil Buzzzes. I got to see the process of the discs being made and then got to watch the full foil magic happen. And then I picked the foils to use and helped stamp the discs. Finally, we bagged them up,” said Heinold. The tournament is releasing 10 foils on each of the six designs: Pink/blue rainbow, gold drop, gold, rainbow, party time, red shatter, wonderbread, silver holographic, blue sparkle, yellow/red/pink rainbow. These will be sold to support the event.
While stamping the full foils they actually made 30 Ti Buzzzes and 30 Cryztal Buzzzes with the Les White stamps. With six designs, that means that each design went on 5 Ti Buzzzes and 5 Cryztal Buzzzes. “Part of the reason for doing this was to test how the stamps were going to look and then to just make some more cool stuff to raise funds for the event,” said Heinold. It took a little while to get the stamping right but once it got set things worked well. For the Ti and Cryztal Buzzzes they used the following foils: Flag, Digital Rainbow, Clear Sparkle, Blue/yellow/green rainbow and blood splatter. The full run of ESP Swirly Les White Buzzzes should get released to vendors starting in late March. The Robo bee will be the most limited bee, only available to Infinite Discs and the tournament. Infinite Discs is one of the largest sponsors of the event and the official vendor of the event. Only 250 of those will be released. The rest of the five bee designs will see 600 Buzzzes released for each design for a total of 3000.
Here are pictures of each of the foils released for the Les White Full Foil Buzzzes:
