Custom Pin-Back Buttons for North Bay Shore, New York

Spell the whole name on the artwork

A party planner putting together a fiftieth birthday or a twenty fifth anniversary is usually solving the same small problem: the favour on every table has to look like it belongs to that one night, and it has to look identical on all of the tables. A round pin-back button does that plainly. One piece of artwork, one name, one date, printed in full colour, pinned to a lapel or dropped into a favour bag as guests come through the door. Party favours are most of what we print for North Bay Shore.

The single most common correction on a party file for this area is the name itself. The hamlet shares a name root with Bay Shore, which sits about two and a half miles off, and a designer working from a scribbled note will often shorten it. Printed on a two and a quarter inch circle, "Bay Shore" is not a smaller version of the longer name. It is a different place, and half the room will notice.

So write the full wording into the file before you upload it. If the design carries a ZIP code, 11706 is the one to use. If it carries a township or a county, Islip and Suffolk County are the ones people here will expect to read. None of this affects what you pay. It only affects whether the button says what you meant it to say, and a button is a piece of paper under a lens, which magnifies a typo rather than hiding it.

Five sizes, and four price bands on each

There are five round sizes and nothing else.

The 1.5 inch button is $1.89 each. It is the small one, the size that sits on a lapel or a dress strap without pulling at the fabric, and it holds a name, a number, or a short line of text.

The 2.25 inch button is $1.99 each. This is the middle size and the one most party orders land on, because a photograph and a line of type can share the face without either one getting squeezed.

The 3 inch button is $2.49 each. It gives the most surface, which matters when the design is a photograph of the guest of honour rather than lettering.

The break applies to the whole run of that size, not only the buttons above the line. The tenth button costs what the thousandth costs. Adding buttons nobody needs is still waste, except in the few counts just below a break, where the larger order is genuinely cheaper. Order the number of guests you actually have, plus whatever cushion you want for the people who bring somebody.

A worked order at 750 buttons

Take a large reception ordering the middle size. 750 of the 2.25 inch button at $1.39 each, 30 percent below the listed rate, is $1042.50 in buttons. Flat shipping on an order of that size is $24.99, which brings the order to $1067.49 before tax.

That is the whole arithmetic. The per button figure moved because the count was 750: at 75 of that size it would have been the full listed rate.

How the shipping tiers work

Shipping is a flat charge set by the total number of buttons on the order, not by weight and not by what the buttons cost.

Up to 100 buttons is $9.99. Up to 250 is $14.99. Up to 500 is $19.99. Up to 1000 is $24.99.

The tiers are worth a glance when your count is sitting just above a line. An order of 500 pays $19.99. Add one more button and the whole order moves to $24.99, which is also what an order of 1000 pays. If you have just crossed 500 and the guest list is still moving, the extra buttons between there and 1000 ride on the same $24.99 charge you already owe. If the count is firm, you are paying a tier with a great deal of unused room in it, and that is worth knowing before you commit rather than after.

Local pickup is free and sits outside the tiers entirely, which is the other way to make the shipping line disappear.

Pickup or shipping, and the distance involved

North Bay Shore is 10.9 miles south east of us in a straight line. That is close enough that a fair number of party orders are collected rather than shipped, and free pickup costs nothing regardless of how many buttons are on the order.

The same is true of the places immediately around it. Brentwood is 1.5 miles off, Baywood 1.6, Bay Shore 2.5, Brightwaters 2.8 and Deer Park 3.2. If the person handling the order works or lives in any of those, pickup is the simpler arrangement. If nobody has a free run at it, the flat tier above covers shipping anywhere in the state and beyond it.

What you upload

Buttons are printed in full colour from artwork you supply, so what you send is what goes on the face. Two things are worth keeping in mind while the design is still open. The face is a circle, so anything that matters, a name, a date, a face, should sit comfortably inside a round crop rather than running to the corners of a square file. And the wrap over the edge of the button takes a thin band of the outer design with it, so a border that hugs the rim will read thinner on the finished button than it does on screen.

Who tends to order these

The professional planner. You are running more than one event and you want a unit cost you can quote into a package. Read it off the band the guest count lands in, once per event. The rate table is the reason buttons keep showing up on those quotes.

The family doing a parent's anniversary. There is usually a photograph involved, often an old one, and usually a request for the 3 inch so that faces are actually recognisable across a room.

The parent with a house full of nine year olds. Small count, 1.5 inch, one cartoon and a first name. This is the order that stays well under the first shipping tier.

The reunion or club committee. A standing annual dinner, a design that changes only in the year printed on it, and a count that tracks the RSVP list. This is the group most likely to end up near a tier boundary, and most likely to care about it.

Answers before you order

Can I collect a North Bay Shore order in person instead of paying for shipping? Yes. Pickup is free and it is not tied to a tier, so a single button and a thousand buttons cost the same nothing to collect.

Does ordering more buttons for a North Bay Shore party bring the price per button down? No. Every size has one price that holds for the first ninety-nine of a size. 100, 250 and 500 appear in both ladders, which is a coincidence worth knowing rather than a rule.

What does shipping cost on 750 buttons going to North Bay Shore? $24.99. Anything from 501 up to 1000 buttons sits in that tier, so 750 and 1000 carry the same shipping charge.

Our invitations say North Bay Shore. Should the buttons say the same thing? Yes, and it is worth checking the file specifically for this. The shortened version names the neighbouring community, not yours, and once it is printed on the face there is nothing to be done about it.

Which size suits a North Bay Shore birthday party, the 1.5 inch or the 3 inch? If the design is a name or a number, the 1.5 inch at $1.89 holds it. If the design is a photograph, take the 3 inch at $2.49 so the image is not reduced to a thumbnail. Most parties that want both a picture and a line of text choose the 2.25 inch at $1.99 and are done deciding. Two smaller diameters round out the range, the 1 inch at $1.49 and the 1.25 inch at $1.69.