Custom Pin-Back Buttons for Malverne, New York

One hundred and one 3 inch buttons at $1.99 each, 20 percent below the listed rate, is $200.99, and the flat shipping on an order that size is $14.99, so the total lands at $215.98 before tax. That sum buys a full colour button for every name on a mid sized staff list, printed from your own artwork, in the largest of the five sizes we make. Nothing in that figure is an estimate. The per button price is fixed, the shipping is a flat tier, and the two numbers add up to the whole bill.

Awareness month orders tend to come in with the headcount already settled. Somebody at a Malverne workplace has agreed to organise the observance, a date is on the calendar, and the remaining question is what people are actually going to wear on a lapel or a lanyard for the length of the month. A button answers that cheaply and without a sizing chart, which is why the same kind of order comes through year after year.

Where the $215.98 comes from

There are two lines on an order and only two. The first is buttons. A 1 inch button is $1.49, a 1.25 inch is $1.69, a 1.5 inch is $1.89, a 2.25 inch is $1.99, and a 3 inch is $2.49. Two sizes on one order climb two separate ladders. One pays the listed rate. A thousand of one size is past the ceiling, so that one is quoted rather than priced automatically. The thresholds are printed, so there is nothing to hunt for and nothing to pad towards blindly.

The second line is shipping, charged as a flat tier based on the total number of buttons on the order. Up to 100 buttons the shipping is $9.99. Up to 250 it is $14.99. Up to 500 it is $19.99. Up to 1000 it is $24.99. The two sets of boundaries sit on the same three numbers and are counted from different totals.

The one button that costs five dollars

The worked example above orders 101 buttons, and 101 is one button past the first shipping line. At 100 buttons the order sits in the $9.99 tier. At 101 it moves into the $14.99 tier. The extra button costs $2.49 as it always would, and the postage costs $5.00 more than it would have.

That is worth knowing before you finalise a number, not because $5.00 changes a budget but because people often land on a quantity like 101 by accident. A headcount of 96 becomes 101 when five spares get added, and the spares quietly push the order over a line. If the spares matter, order them and pay the $14.99 without a second thought. If they were a rounding habit, 100 is the tidier number. Either way the decision is about postage only. The buttons themselves are indifferent.

Choosing between 1.5, 2.25 and 3 inch

At 1.5 inch you have room for a symbol, a ribbon, a single word, or a very short line of type. It reads well on a shirt pocket and it disappears politely on a suit. At 2.25 inch you get the size most people picture when they hear the word button, with enough face for a ribbon plus a short phrase. At 3 inch you can carry a logo, a ribbon and a full line of wording without crowding any of the three, which is usually why awareness month runs end up there. All five are round, pin-back, and printed in full colour from the file you upload.

A cluster of towns inside two miles

Malverne sits 20.2 miles south west of the shop in a straight line, but the more useful geography for an order like this is local. Five places we also cover are all within two miles: Lakeview at 1.2 miles, Franklin Square at 1.5 miles, Lynbrook at 1.7 miles, West Hempstead at 1.8 miles and Valley Stream at 2.0 miles. That is an unusually tight cluster.

It matters for a workplace order in a practical way. A staff list at one site is very often drawn from all six of those places at once, and an organiser covering more than one office in Nassau County is usually covering offices a couple of miles apart rather than a county apart. One order covering every site stays on a single shipping tier. Splitting a run across separate orders splits the count that earns the discount, which is the new reason to keep it together. Combining is the only lever you have, and here the sites are close enough that combining is rarely inconvenient.

Getting the artwork right

Upload the art you already have. Full colour is standard, so a ribbon in its proper shade, a logo in brand colour and a photographic background are all ordinary requests. The one thing worth checking before you send a file is the edge. A button face is flat, but the printed sheet wraps around a curve to the back, so anything sitting hard against the outer edge of your design will bend away from the viewer. Leave a margin of breathing room around wording and around the outside of a logo and the front of the button will show what you intended.

If you are reusing last year's file, open it and look at the date or the year line before you upload. That is the single most common thing an organiser discovers after the order is placed rather than before.

Four people who place this order

If you volunteered to run the month and now own the whole thing, work from a headcount rather than a guess, add whatever spares you actually want, and then check the number against the 100 line. That one check is the entire optimisation available to you.

If you are ordering across several offices in and around Malverne, count every site into one order. The per button price will not reward you for splitting or for combining, but the shipping tier will.

If you are working against a committee budget that was approved as a round number, you can price the order exactly before you commit. Multiply the headcount by the size price, look up the tier, add the two. There is no line item you have not seen and nothing that shifts after the fact.

Reorders start their own count. If the combined number would clear 100 of one size, ordering it once is the cheaper route. Quantity has no effect on that price, so a smaller reorder this year does not cost you more per piece than the bigger run did last year.

Questions we get asked

Does the price per button drop if our Malverne order goes from 101 up to 250? Yes, within a single size. 101 of the 3 inch is $1.99 each and 250 of it is $1.87 each, because 250 reaches the 250 to 499 band. Ninety-nine of a size costs more in total than a hundred of it, which is worth a second look at a boundary. 250 of the 3 inch is $1.87 each against $1.99 at 101, because 250 sits in the 250 to 499 band.

Our Malverne staff come in from Lakeview and Valley Stream. Should we place separate orders by town? There is no pricing reason to. Splitting one size across several designs costs nothing, because the designs are added together for the discount.

We need 101 buttons for our Malverne headcount. Is there a reason to order 100 instead? Only postage. One hundred buttons sit in the $9.99 tier and 101 sit in the $14.99 tier, a difference of $5.00. If you want the 101st button, order it.

Can a Malverne order mix the five sizes? Yes. Each size is charged at its own rate, on its own count, $1.49, $1.69, $1.89, $1.99 or $2.49 per button, and the shipping tier is worked out from the total number of buttons on the order regardless of how the sizes are split.

What changes if a Malverne order goes past 250 buttons? The shipping tier, and nothing else. Orders up to 500 buttons ship at $19.99 and orders up to 1000 ship at $24.99. Every button on the order is still priced at the same published band rate as a single button would be.