Custom Pin-Back Buttons for Flower Hill, New York

An order going to Flower Hill is identified by its street address, not by a postal code of its own, because the village has no ZIP on file with us. The house number, the street, the village name and Nassau County are what carry the box to the right door. That is worth knowing up front if you are the person filling in the delivery details for a run of staff and volunteer badges, because the address box is doing more of the work here than it does in most places.

The address line is the whole routing instruction

Type the address the way you would write it on an envelope: number, street, village, state. If a form asks for a postal code and you are not certain which one belongs to the property, use the code that already appears on mail delivered there rather than guessing. A wrong code is a worse outcome than a plain, correct street address, and the street address is what we work from.

This matters more than usual on a badge order, because badge orders tend to be placed by someone acting for a group. The billing card belongs to a committee, the person placing the order is a coordinator, and the box needs to land somewhere a volunteer can actually receive it. Decide which of those is the shipping address before you start, and put that one in.

What a staff and volunteer badge run costs

The published bands are 1 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499 and 500 to 999, per size.

• 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

Those are the prices at one button and they are the prices at a thousand. There is no quantity at which the per button figure drops, so you never need to hunt for a break point or pad an order to reach one.

Here is the arithmetic on a real badge set. One hundred and one of the 3 inch button at $1.99 each, 20 percent off because the count clears 100, is $200.99 in buttons. Flat shipping for an order of that size is $14.99. The order comes to $215.98 before tax.

The 101st badge and the postage tier

Shipping is flat, and the flat figure is set by the total number of buttons on the order:

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

Read those two lines against the example above and the point is obvious. That order of 101 sits one button over the first boundary, which moves it from the $9.99 tier to the $14.99 tier. Ordering 100 instead of 101 would keep it in the $9.99 tier and save $5.00 on postage.

Be clear about what is and is not happening there. The per button price is identical either way, $2.49, and those are the rates up to ninety-nine of a size. The buttons get cheaper by the hundred rather than by the dozen: 100 of one size is the first break. The only figure that moved is the flat postage, because a counted total crossed a line. If your headcount genuinely is 101, order 101 and pay the $14.99. If it is really 94 and someone rounded up for comfort, that is a $5.00 rounding error worth catching.

Picking between 1.5, 2.25 and 3 inch

For a badge that carries a name, the size decision is mostly a decision about how much text has to fit.

The 1.5 inch suits a single short word: STAFF, CREW, HOST. Put a full name on it and the type has to shrink further than most people are happy with.

The 2.25 inch is the usual choice for a role badge. A role word across the top and a first name underneath sits at a size a person can read without leaning in.

The 3 inch takes a logo, a role and a full name together, which is why it turns up on check-in desk and lead volunteer badges. It is the size used in the worked example above.

Nothing stops you mixing sizes on one order. A committee sometimes runs 3 inch for a handful of leads and 2.25 inch for everyone else. Each size keeps its own count and so its own rate, and the total count across all sizes is what sets the shipping tier.

Artwork for a set of badges

Buttons are printed full colour from artwork you upload. For badge sets this usually means a family of designs rather than one design: the same layout, with the role word and the colour block changing between them. Build them as separate files, one per variation, so there is no ambiguity about which design is meant to appear how many times.

Two practical notes. Keep names and role words well inside the circle, because a pin-back button wraps at the edge and anything sitting hard against the outer rim curves away from the viewer. And decide early whether you are colour coding roles, since a colour code is easy to build in at the artwork stage and awkward to bolt on afterwards.

How far west of the shop you are

Flower Hill sits 15.8 miles west of the shop in a straight line. That is the straight line figure, not a route and not a duration.

The same page exists for the places next to you, which is worth knowing on a badge order because a committee rarely lives in one village. Port Washington is 1.3 miles out, Manhasset 1.6, North Hills 1.8, Searingtown 2.8 and Great Neck Plaza 2.8. All of them run on the same published rate bands and the same flat shipping tiers, so a coordinator in one and a treasurer in another does not complicate the pricing.

Four people who tend to place this order

The check-in desk organiser. You need every person behind the table identifiable from the other side of it. That is a 3 inch badge with a role and a name, a short list, and usually the smallest part of the order by count.

The volunteer coordinator with a moving headcount. Your list is not final and you know it. Look at the tier table before you commit to a number, because the difference between finishing at 100 and finishing at 101 is $5.00 of postage and nothing else.

The treasurer signing off the spend. You want one number to put in front of a board. Per button price, multiplied by the count, plus the one flat shipping figure from the tier table. That is the order before tax, and there is no second pricing sheet.

The person who inherited the job. Someone did this last year and left you a folder. Check the old artwork against your current role list, and the old count against your current sign-ups, because both change year to year.

Questions that come up on these orders

Flower Hill has no ZIP code of its own on file, so what do I put in the postal code field? Use the code that already appears on post delivered to that address. If you are not sure, the street address is the part we act on. Do not guess at a code to fill the box.

We are ordering badges for an event in Flower Hill and our volunteer list is 101 people. Is there any reason to order exactly 100?

Only postage. One hundred and one buttons falls into the $14.99 shipping tier while

100 falls into the $9.99 tier, a $5.00 difference. Combine designs at one size and the combined count is what sets the rate.

Does a Flower Hill delivery address change what I pay for shipping? No. Shipping is a flat figure set by the total number of buttons on the order, using the tiers listed above. A size's rate is fixed inside its band and steps at the next one.

Can one Flower Hill order mix 2.25 inch and 3 inch badges? Yes. Each size is charged at its own ladder, climbed on its own count, and the combined button count across both sizes is what decides which shipping tier the order lands in.

Our event is in Flower Hill but the coordinator receiving the box is in Manhasset. Which address goes on the order? Whichever address you want the box delivered to. The shipping address is used exactly as you enter it, so put the receiving person's address there and keep the billing details separate if they differ.