Farewell CreaCoins

Dear customer, prospect or business partner,

It’s been many wonderful years for me as a designer and seeing CreaCoins grow as a supplier, which was recognized by many geocachers and mega organization teams as their trusted party to design and produce their geocoins and tags.

I want to thank everybody who trusted me with their design projects and made these many years a wonderful journey and learning experience!

It all started in 2014 when I designed my series “Famous Belgians”. Now 12 years later and many, many design projects later, this story is coming to its end. There are several reasons for my decision:

1. Two years ago, at the age of 68 years (young) and already enjoying retirement since 3 years, I took the decision to stop my consulting activities in intercultural management to business schools and multinational companies. This meant that all overhead costs of the company were now to be paid with revenue generated from geocoin and tags projects. Financially, the profit gained from this projects was not worth all the effort and time still spent in that business.
2. Not only the geocaching game has gone through many changes since I started geocaching 17 years ago, but also the geocoin usage and demand market has tremendously changed in this last 12 years. Finding a cache to place geocoins has become a serious challenge with normal size caches being a rarity compared to the today’s overwhelming presence of film cannisters and petlings. The “geocoin market” became even more than in the past a market for geocoin collectors and not one of a game element of geocaching (travelling from cache to cache).
3. Finally, the added value I bring to customers as a designer transforming their concepts in to creative designs is being replaced more and more by AI. And one may disagree, but the last year half of the projects that customers submitted to me were AI generated designs that look separately sometimes pretty nice, but, when looked at one after the other, lack a lot of the originality of sketch based concepts and more unique projects.

What does this mean on the short term for running projects and new projects:

1. For those who already contacted me for their new projects, please understand that I will no longer be able to operate as before as of August 1^st 2026, meaning that projects need to develop to the stage where the invoice was made and payment received before September 1^st 2026.
2. For those still wanting to submit their project to me the deadline for submission will be July 30^th 2026 and that the project needs to develop to the stage where the invoice was made and payment received before September 1^st 2026.

Thank you again for the trust I was given for so many years!

Geo-greetings,

Luc C. De Haes