When Survivor was gearing up to film its milestone 50th season, Jeff Probst wanted to find a way to honor and thank the beating heart behind the production: the crew.

Typically, crew gifts might be a jacket or a hat, but the Survivor host and showrunner tells PEOPLE exclusively that he was looking for a gift from him that felt “individual and personal” to commemorate such a monumental milestone. After asking friends and family for ideas, he kept coming back to the idea of a custom dog tag necklace.

“I wear one every day that has the day I got married. It says, ‘Dance with me,’ ” Probst says. “I have a personal connection to a dog tag, so that probably was some influence. But I also appreciated that with a dog tag you could truly make it individual and unique.”

Probst, 64, says he spent a few days on Etsy looking at the work of different artists, eventually coming across one that stood out in January 2025

That’s when Amanda Vernor and Gina Thompson, the sisters behind Heavy Metalz Studio in Florida, received an inquiry for a sample dog tag with the phrase “Celebrate 50.”

“I didn’t want the name of the show to influence anything. I just wanted to see her pure interpretation of the idea,” says Probst, who didn’t initially reveal his identity either. None the wiser, Vernor tells PEOPLE that she simply thought, “Someone is having a really big 50th anniversary.”

As they continued to correspond about the design, the sisters learned that the order would require hundreds of dog tags to be made and found out the client’s name. As Survivor fans (and like contestants on the show), the sisters started to put the puzzle pieces together.

Eventually, Probst revealed that he wanted the final version to say “Survivor 50.”

Probst recalls, “I remember her saying, ‘I didn’t want to say anything, but I was secretly hoping that’s what this was for.’ And that’s when I knew, ‘Oh, I absolutely picked the right person.’ “

Vernor quit her job as a teacher after becoming a mother nearly two decades ago, hoping to spend more time at home with her children. She started making personalized jewelry that she sold at a local market, and the business quickly took off.

She opened an Etsy shop before launching a website for the designs, with her sister later joining the operation. Though they started making jewelry for fellow moms with their kids’ names, they began offering dog tags so men would have an option for personalized jewelry as well.

Vernor and Thompson, who say they work well together but confess they “have their moments,” only had a few months to handcraft the Survivor necklaces: gathering supplies, cutting the raw materials into the right size, filing, smoothing and stamping them — one letter at a time.

“We had to come up with a system to be a human assembly line. All our counters were full,” Vernor says, admitting that she didn’t tell Probst that this was the biggest order they had ever received. In the end, they made 450 dog tags (plus quite a few that didn’t pass Thompson’s “quality control” inspection), each featuring “Survivor 50” on one side and individually numbered on the other.

The finished dog tags were shipped to Fiji in early April, and crew members — including everyone from producers and camera operators to housekeepers and laundry staff — received them as they arrived on location for filming.

Probst says, “When it came to handing them out, we wanted it to reflect how we see ourselves, which is we’re one team. So there was no assigning of numbers and no hierarchy based on seniority. We put all the tags in one big box, and as crew members arrived in Fiji, they just reach in and grab one.”

“Fittingly, a brand-new crew member pulled number one, which really said it all,” he continued. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been here one season or all 50 — you’re a part of the team.”

Crew members kept asking Probst when he was going to pick one of the dog tags, but he was insistent that they were a gift from him. However, the team secretly reached out to Heavy Metalz Studio and had a 14k gold dog tag made for their showrunner.

“That really meant a lot because it was the completion of our team,” he says. “And I can’t say that enough. That is what it feels like to work on this show — it’s never about any one person. It’s always about the entire team.”

Probst adds, “Something about these dog tags, which were all antiqued and distressed and all hand-stamped, kind of captured the essence of our show, of our crew, of base camp, of everything it takes to make Survivor.”

The necklaces were worn throughout the shoot, with staffers seeing them as more than a fun souvenir from the job.

“The dog tags represent more than just the season. They represent the crew, the hard work and the bond we’ve built along the way,” says Jayde Leota, who works as a diver in the marine department. “Season 50 has been something special to be part of, and I’m proud to wear my necklace and represent the awesome team behind it all.”

Adds Dionne Jones, a junior shooter in the camera department, “I like how every dog tag was handmade, with a number for each crew member. Arts supporting the arts!”

“We are a very big crew, local and international, and I am very lucky to work beside them for 27 seasons,” Jones adds.

Housekeeping supervisor Viniana Lagilagi calls the necklaces a “masterpiece,” while production assistant Pita Toga tells PEOPLE, “This will definitely go up on my wall at home.”

Probst calls filming Survivor 50 the “most personally joyful time I’ve ever had doing anything work-related in my life.”

“I was genuinely celebrating every day,” he explains. “I was full of gratitude that our show was still on, that we could still make it, that people would still show up to play. Then I’m looking around, and I’ve got this crew, and they’re working their ass off every single day and every single one of them smiling all day.”

Probst adds that he spent a lot of time during the filming of the milestone season reflecting and taking in the moment rather than constantly looking ahead to the next thing to be done.

“In our family, we have a phrase which is, ‘Are we going to get a cake?’ And what that came from is when the kids were little and something special in their life would happen, they would accomplish something, I would always go get a cake. At first, they thought it was absolutely ridiculous. They said, ‘Are we going to get a cake every time we do something really significant?’ I said, ‘Yeah, because you have to take a moment to celebrate.’ “

“It’s always been important to me because we move at such a fast pace, and especially if you’re in a job like in Hollywood where the network wants the next episode and you’ve got to have the next idea, I just like to remind our crew it is okay to take a step back and say, ‘I’m proud of that challenge I just built,’ or, ‘I’m really proud of the episode I just produced,’ ” he adds. “So that’s what 50 was for me.”

And, yes, Probst did get a cake to mark Survivor 50 — after some urging from his son.