Custom Pin-Back Buttons for Mineola, New York

Williston Park sits half a mile from Mineola, and Garden City Park, Herricks, Carle Place and Garden City all fall within a mile and three quarters of the same centre point. That is five named places inside a circle you could cross on foot. For anyone running a club, a society, a chapter or a committee, that geography is the whole story, because a membership list drawn from a place like this almost never sits inside one set of boundaries. The pins you hand out at a meeting have to mean something to the member who walked four blocks and to the member who came from the next village over.

A half mile between one club room and the next

Most towns have a nearest neighbour a few miles off. Here the nearest one is 0.5 miles, which is closer than the distance between two ends of many single neighbourhoods. Garden City Park and Herricks are both 1.3 miles out. Carle Place is 1.5 miles. Garden City is 1.6 miles. Every one of those is a place we already cover, so a club whose members are spread across all six is not a complicated order, it is one order.

What that means in practice is that the person doing the ordering is usually doing it for other people. They are not buying a badge for themselves. They are buying forty, or a hundred and twenty, or two hundred, and they are the one who has to explain the cost to a treasurer, hand the box round at a meeting and hear about it if somebody's name is spelled wrong. The rest of this page is written for that person.

Five sizes, and where each one steps down

There are five round pin-back buttons and nothing else in the catalogue.

• 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

Full colour, printed from artwork you upload.

A larger count of one size cannot cost more per button than a smaller one. It is $1.89 for one 1.5 inch button and $1.89 for the four hundredth 1.5 inch button on the same order. There is no quantity at which the unit price steps down, and there is no minimum you have to reach before a price applies. That is deliberate, and it makes committee arithmetic simple: multiply the number of members by the size you chose, and you have the cost of the buttons.

The 1.5 inch is the usual choice for a member pin worn on a lapel or a lanyard. The 2.25 inch gives a crest or a monogram room to be read at arm's length. The 3 inch is the one clubs pick when the emblem has fine detail, a motto around the rim, or a founding year that needs to survive being shrunk.

Forty badges for a club of forty

Here is a real worked order, the kind a club organiser puts together.

Forty of the 1.5 inch button at $1.89 each comes to $75.60 in buttons. Flat shipping on an order that size is $9.99. The order total is $85.59 before tax.

That is the entire calculation. No setup fee is folded into it, no artwork charge, no per colour charge. If the club decided to go up to the 2.25 inch instead, the buttons would come to $79.60 at $1.99 each, and the shipping line would not move, because shipping is set by how many buttons are on the order rather than how big they are.

Mineola is 15.7 miles south west of the shop, measured straight line rather than by road.

Where the postage changes and where it does not

Shipping is a flat charge decided 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

The number worth watching is 100. An order of 100 buttons ships at $9.99. An order of 101 ships at $14.99, and so does an order of 250. So if your roster is sitting at 104 and you were only ordering four spares out of caution, those four spares are costing you five dollars more than the buttons themselves. Go to 100 and the tier holds. Go to 110 and you may as well go to 250, because the shipping charge is identical the whole way up.

A growing count moves the rate band for that size first and the shipping tier second. It does not touch the price per button, which stays where it is up to ninety-nine of that size.

Sending in a crest, a logo or a hand drawn emblem

Club artwork tends to arrive in one of three states. Some clubs have a proper digital emblem already. Some have a scan of something printed on a shirt or a banner. Some have a drawing that a member made and nobody has ever put into a file. All three get uploaded the same way, and all five print in full colour.

If your club has a motto, a chapter number or a founding year around the edge of the emblem, the 3 inch is the size that keeps that ring of small text legible. If the emblem is a simple shape, a letter or a single symbol, the 1.5 inch holds it without trouble. When you are unsure, the honest test is to print your artwork on paper at the finished diameter and look at it from the distance a person would actually be standing.

You can also run more than one design in a single order. A committee badge and a general member badge, or a distinct pin for each chapter, all count toward the same button total for the shipping tier.

Four people who order club pins

The membership secretary. You have a list, the list has a number on the bottom of it, and you want that number times a price. Pick a size, multiply, add the shipping tier, and that is the figure you take to the meeting.

The chapter organiser covering more than one village. Your members are not in one place, and half of them are closer to Williston Park or Carle Place than to anywhere else. One order, one box, one person distributing.

The volunteer who inherited the job. The last person who did this left no notes. Nothing in the rate is negotiated, so you can reconstruct what a past order cost without asking anybody.

The society treasurer. You want a line item you can defend. 100, 250 and 500 of a single size are the three numbers worth knowing.

Questions we get asked

Our club meets in Mineola but half the members live in Williston Park. Can one person place the order for everyone?

Yes. Orders are placed as a single order by a single person, and nothing about the order is tied to where individual members live. One committee member ordering for the whole roster is the normal case here.

We need 40 buttons for a Mineola society this year and may need 400 next year. Does the larger order get a better price per button?

It does, in three steps. The discount is counted inside one size, so a hundred of the 1.5 inch earns it and fifty of two different sizes does not. Buy 100 of a size and all 100 are 20 percent cheaper each. A 1.5 inch button is $1.89, which is what 1 to 99 of a size costs. Keeping it on one order matters twice now, once for the single shipping charge and once for the combined count that sets each size's rate.

We are planning around 120 pins for a Mineola club. Is there any reason to change that number?

There may be. At 120 buttons you are in the $14.99 shipping tier, which starts at 101. If you can bring the count to 100 the shipping is $9.99. If you cannot, then anything from 101 up to 250 carries the same $14.99, so there is no shipping reason to keep the number close to 120.

Can a Mineola club order two different sizes on the same order?

Yes. Mix 1.5 inch and 3 inch freely. Each size is charged at its own rate, chosen by how many of it you order, and the shipping tier is worked out from the combined number of buttons, not from each size separately.

Our Mineola chapter would rather not ship. Is local pickup an option?

Yes, local pickup is available at no charge, and choosing it means the flat shipping tier does not apply to your order at all. The button prices are unchanged either way.