Custom Pin-Back Buttons for Cold Spring Harbor

There are two honest ways to end up holding the box, collecting it yourself or having it shipped, and from an address this far out the choice deserves a minute of real thought instead of a default. Collection keeps the shipping charge off the invoice completely. Shipping puts one flat amount on the order and closes the question. Which way makes sense for a given run in Cold Spring Harbor usually comes down to two things: how many buttons are on the order, and whether anyone from your counter is heading toward Huntington anyway.

Two names that share a root

Cold Spring Harbor and Lloyd Harbor are neighbors, and the back half of the two names is the same word. That sounds like trivia until it lands on a shipping label. Orders reach us with one name typed where the other was meant, and once in a while the artwork proof says one thing while the address block says the other. Nothing about it is anyone's fault. Two nearby places, one shared word, a form filled in without a second look.

So we treat the ZIP as the tiebreaker. Addresses here carry 11724 or 11743. If the town name and the ZIP on an order disagree, we ask rather than guess, because guessing is how a box of loyalty pins ends up on the wrong side of a harbor.

Worth separating in your head as well: the words printed on the button and the words in the address field are two different inputs. The address routes the parcel. The artwork is whatever you upload, and if you want a shop name, a street, a number or a word on the face of the button, that is a design decision and not an address decision.

How far out this actually is

The straight line distance from the shop to Cold Spring Harbor is 3.3 miles, running south west. Straight line means exactly that, a line on a map. It is not a route and it is not minutes behind a wheel.

For scale, measured the same way from the same starting point, Huntington is 1.5 miles out, West Manor 2.4, Huntington Station 2.7, West Hills 2.8, and Lloyd Harbor 3.0. All of those sit inside Suffolk County and inside the Huntington township, and we handle orders from every one of them. The point of the list is not that any of them are better placed. It is that the distances between them are small enough that the collect or ship decision is genuinely open, rather than being made for you by geography.

What the five sizes cost

Five round pin-back sizes, and nothing else. Full color, printed from artwork you upload.

• The 1 inch, $1.49 each
• The 1.25 inch, $1.69 each
• The 1.5 inch, $1.89 each
• The 2.25 inch, $1.99 each
• The 3 inch, $2.49 each

There is a discount at 100 of a size, a better one at 250 and the best online one at 500. The rate you pay depends on how many of that one size are on the order. Twenty five is priced at the listed rate and a hundred at 20 percent under the listed rate, which is the whole of the difference. Nobody has to guess at a threshold or pad an order to reach one.

The 2.25 inch is the usual pick for a pin that goes on an apron or an employee lanyard. The 1.5 inch reads as a small accent. The 3 inch gives artwork room to hold detail, which matters if your logo has fine lettering in it.

A 240 button order, line by line

Take a run of 240 of the 2.25 inch button. At $1.59 each, the band rate once 100 of one size are on the order, that is $381.60 in buttons. Flat shipping for an order that size is $14.99, so the order comes to $396.59 before tax.

The shipping tiers go by total buttons on the order:

• up to 100, $9.99
• up to 250, $14.99
• up to 500, $19.99
• up to 1000, $24.99

Now look at where 240 sits. It is ten buttons under the 250 line. Add twenty more and you pay $39.80 for the buttons themselves, which is fine, but the order also crosses into the next tier and the shipping goes from $14.99 to $19.99. Five dollars is not a catastrophe. It is just the kind of thing worth seeing before you round a number up out of habit. The reverse is also true: if you were planning 260 and could live with 250, both counts sit in the 250 to 499 band, so the rate per button is identical and the shipping tier stays where it is too.

If you collect the order instead, none of the tier arithmetic applies, because there is no shipping line on the invoice at all.

Four people ordering the same box for different reasons

The shop owner with a loyalty scheme. The card in the customer's wallet and the pin on the staff apron are doing the same job from two directions. A run in the low hundreds covers a counter for a long stretch of reordering, and the per button rate you can look up means a second run later costs exactly what the first one did per piece.

The owner who just hired. One new person, one pin, and suddenly the original run is short. Small top-up orders are ordinary here. You can read the rate for your count off the table, so a top-up is not punished.

The weekend stall. Pins handed across a table are a giveaway and a sign at the same time. A 1.5 inch at $1.89 keeps the per-piece math simple when you are working out what a table of giveaways costs you.

The retailer with two counters. One artwork, one order, split into two piles when it arrives. There is no reason to place two separate orders, and combining them keeps the whole run inside a single shipping tier if the total allows it.

Questions people here ask

My mail comes to 11743, but I am in Cold Spring Harbor. Which do I put on the order?

Put both. Write the town as you normally would and use the ZIP that your mail actually uses. The ZIP is what we trust when the two do not match, and 11743 is shared, so it will not surprise us.

Is it worth collecting a Cold Spring Harbor order rather than having it shipped?

That depends on whether the trip is happening anyway. Collecting removes the flat shipping charge from the total, which on a 240 button order is $14.99. From 500 to 999 of a size the rate is 30 percent under the listed one. There is no surcharge and no discount attached to the choice, only the shipping line appearing or not appearing.

Do bigger Cold Spring Harbor orders get a lower price per button?

Yes, and it is worth knowing where the steps are. It comes down 20 percent at 100 of a size, 25 at 250 and 30 at 500, and a thousand of one size goes to a quote instead. 1,000 of a single size is quoted by a person rather than priced automatically. The count moves two numbers, the rate band for that size and the shipping tier for the order.

If I raise a 240 button Cold Spring Harbor order to 300, what changes?

The buttons go up by the published rate for each one you add, and the shipping moves from the up to 250 tier at $14.99 into the up to 500 tier at $19.99. Nothing else about the pricing changes.

My artwork says Lloyd Harbor but my shop is in Cold Spring Harbor. Is that a problem?

Not at all. The artwork is yours and it prints as you supply it. The address field is a separate thing and it is the one that routes the box. We only raise it with you if the address itself looks internally inconsistent, for example a town name and a ZIP that point in different directions.

Placing the order

Upload your artwork, pick one of the five sizes, and set your quantity. The per-button price you see is the one you pay up to ninety-nine of that size, and the only other line is a flat shipping charge, or no shipping charge at all if you would rather come and get the box.