Custom Pin-Back Buttons for Muttontown, New York

## A ring of neighbours, not a single point on a map

Syosset and Jericho both sit 2.5 miles from Muttontown, the same figure in two different directions, and Old Westbury is only a little further at 3.6 miles, with Hicksville and Locust Valley each at 3.9 miles. Five places we already cover form a close ring, and a club roster drawn from that ring rarely belongs to one place alone. That is the situation this page is written for: full colour pin back buttons ordered by the people who keep a club or society running, printed from artwork they upload, in five round sizes and nothing else.

The tie between Syosset and Jericho is the useful thing here. Two neighbours at an identical 2.5 miles means a meeting held in the middle is an equally short trip from either side, and it means a club rooted in one of them and a club rooted in the other are, in practice, drawing from overlapping ground. Old Westbury, Hicksville and Locust Valley fill in the rest of the ring at under four miles, all of it inside Nassau County.

For buttons, the consequence is simple. One design, one order, one set of pins handed out at one gathering, and the people who take them home scatter across five or six places without the pin caring. You are ordering one batch for one membership, not five batches for five towns.

## Five sizes, and what each one is actually doing

There are five round pin back buttons and no other shapes or formats.

The 1.5 inch button is the lapel size. It carries a mark, a monogram, a short club name, a year, a rank. It does not carry a paragraph.

The 2.25 inch button is the general purpose size and the one most societies land on. There is room for a crest plus a line of text under it, or a name plus a role, and it still reads from across a room without dominating the garment.

The 3 inch button is the one you choose when the design has to be legible at distance or when the artwork is genuinely detailed. A full club emblem with a border motto, a committee title, a commemorative date, an illustration with small elements in it. At 3 inches, fine strokes in the artwork stay open instead of closing up.

## What five hundred three inch pins cost

20 percent comes off at 100 of one size, 25 percent at 250 and 30 percent at 500. Those three boundaries are published and they do not move, so you can work out what any count of a size costs before you order it.

• 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

A worked example, because clubs usually want the whole number before they take it to a committee. Five hundred of the 3 inch button at $1.74 each, 30 percent under the 1 to 99 figure, is $870.00 in buttons. Flat shipping on an order of that size is $19.99. The order comes to $889.99 before tax.

Nothing in that calculation has a hidden step. Ten of the same pin is $24.90 in buttons. Five hundred is exactly fifty times that. The per button figure is the per button figure.

What 100 of one size changes

Shipping is a flat charge 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 order has two step functions in it now, the rate band and the shipping tier. That is worth a minute of thought if your count sits just above a boundary. An order of 505 buttons falls into the $24.99 tier while 500 falls into the $19.99 tier, so those five extra buttons cost their own price plus five dollars of shipping. If they are genuinely spare, keep them. If someone simply rounded up, trimming back is free money. The same logic applies at 100 and at 250.

## Eight point nine miles, and why it is worth knowing

Muttontown sits 8.9 miles south west of the shop, measured as a straight line rather than a route. That is a distance worth knowing for one reason: local pickup is free, so a club that would rather not ship can collect the order instead of paying a tier. On a small run, that removes the $9.99 outright. On a 1000 button run it removes $24.99.

## Artwork for a club emblem

Club and society artwork tends to arrive in one of two states. Either it is a clean vector file somebody paid to have drawn, in which case there is nothing to discuss, or it is a scan of something that predates anyone currently on the committee. The second case is common and workable. What matters is resolution at the printed size and contrast between the emblem and its background. A crest designed to be embroidered often has strokes thinner than a 1.5 inch print wants, and moving that same crest up to 2.25 inch or 3 inch solves it without redrawing anything.

Printing is full colour, so a multi colour crest costs the same as a one colour monogram. There is no reason to simplify a design for price.

## If you chair the club

You need a number you can read out and a total nobody amends later. The published per button rate gives you that. Decide the size, multiply, add the one shipping line, and the figure you take to the committee is the figure on the order.

## If you run the membership table

Your problem is coverage, not design. Count the members who will realistically show, add the guests who always turn up, and then check whether that number sits just over a tier line. Coming in at or under 100, 250 or 500 is where the total behaves best.

## If you organise a society's annual event

An annual event usually wants the year on the pin, which means the design changes every cycle and the previous file is a starting point rather than a reprint. Keep the elements that stay constant on their own layer if you can, because that makes next year a text edit instead of a rebuild.

## If you are the volunteer with the design software

You are doing this for free and you would like to do it once. Build at the largest of the five sizes you might use, keep text well inside the edge, and you can produce all five sizes from one file without reworking the layout.

## Questions organisers here tend to ask

**Our Muttontown club has members in Syosset and Jericho. Do we need separate orders?**

No. One order, one design, one batch. The pins do not need to know which of the three places a member drove in from, and splitting the order would only add a second shipping charge.

**Does ordering more pins for a Muttontown society bring the price per button down?**

It does not. The rate falls in steps rather than on a curve, at 100, 250 and 500 of a size. There are no breaks and no thresholds. The rate band answers to one size's count and the shipping tier answers to the total.

**We want 520 pins for a Muttontown event. Is that a sensible number?**

It is a legal number but it is an awkward one. At 520 you are in the $24.99 shipping tier, twenty buttons past the $19.99 line. If the twenty are real spares, keep them. If not, 500 is the cleaner place to stop.

**There is no ZIP code on file for Muttontown. Will that hold up an order?** No. Orders are keyed to the street address you enter, not to a ZIP on our end, so the absence of one in our records changes nothing about how your order is handled.

**Which size should a Muttontown club choose for a lapel pin with a crest on it?** If the crest is simple, 1.5 inch works and wears comfortably on a jacket. If the crest has a motto ring, fine linework or small internal detail, step up to 2.25 inch. Hold 3 inch for pins meant to be read at distance rather than worn all evening.