Custom Pin-Back Buttons for Setauket, New York

The honest first decision on any order from this far east is not the artwork and not the size. It is whether somebody is going to come and collect the boxes in person, or whether you would rather pay a flat shipping charge and have them brought to you. Plenty of Setauket orders go each way, and neither choice is the clever one. It depends entirely on whether a person on your side of the county was already making the trip west.

Collecting or shipping, and how to pick

Free local pickup costs nothing, so on paper it always wins. In practice it wins only when somebody is going that direction anyway. If one of your volunteers commutes west, or has family out that way, pickup turns into a small favour rather than a special journey, and the shipping line on the order disappears entirely. If nobody is making that trip, shipping is the sane answer, and the flat tier is usually a smaller number than people expect for a box of several hundred buttons.

The straight line distance from the shop is 15.3 miles, heading east. That is a map measurement and not a driving figure, and the roads do not run in straight lines, so treat it as a rough sense of scale rather than a plan. Its real use is for deciding whether pickup is realistic for the people on your list. If the answer is no, ship it and stop thinking about it.

Two spellings of the same name, and one order form

Setauket and East Setauket share a name root, sit next to each other, and get confused constantly, including by people who live in both. They are 2.2 miles apart. Nothing about a button order changes between them, but the address field does care, and so does anyone trying to hand off a box to the right person. When several people are contributing to one order, write out the full address once, including the ZIP code, rather than assuming the name alone is enough. The 11733 ZIP does a lot of the disambiguating work here.

The same caution applies to anyone coordinating across the wider cluster. Port

Jefferson is 2.4 miles out, Stony Brook 2.8, Port Jefferson Station 3.1 and Terryville 4.2. Those are short hops between neighbours, which is exactly why a single address written in shorthand can end up meaning two different places to two different volunteers.

What a canvass order of five hundred actually comes to

Here is a real arithmetic example rather than a vague range. Five hundred and one of the 2.25 inch button at $1.39 each, the rate that applies from 500 of one size, is $696.39 in buttons. An order of that size falls in the $24.99 flat shipping tier, so the order comes to $721.38 before tax.

Now look at that odd extra button. Shipping is tiered by the total number of buttons on the order: up to 100 is $9.99, up to 250 is $14.99, up to 500 is $19.99, and up to 1000 is $24.99. Ordering 500 instead of 501 keeps you inside the $19.99 tier and saves $5.00 in postage. If you genuinely need 501, pay the $5.00 and think no more of it. If the 501 came out of a spreadsheet rather than a real need, trim it.

Each size counts on its own

Above 999 of one size the answer is a quote, so the published ladder stops there. The 1 inch is $1.49 each, the 1.25 inch is $1.69 each, the 1.5 inch is $1.89 each, the 2.25 inch is $1.99 each and the 3 inch is $2.49 each from 1 to 99 of a size, and a thousand of one size goes to a quote rather than an automatic price. The ladder is published rather than negotiated, so there is nothing to ask for: your count applies it.

This matters more than it sounds for a campaign committee, because it removes the usual guessing game. You do not have to inflate an order to reach a price tier that does not exist. Quantity moves two figures, and the two are counted differently: the rate per size, the shipping across every size.

Count buttons, not designs

The shipping tier looks at the total number of buttons on the order, not the number of different designs or sizes. Three separate designs at 150 each is 450 buttons, one order, one $19.99 shipping charge. Split into three separate orders it is three shipping charges. For a committee running a slate, or one running different messages for different streets, that is the single easiest place to waste money, and the fix is simply to place one order.

Each design is printed in full colour from artwork you upload, so mixing a candidate button, an issue button and a plain logo button on the same order costs nothing extra beyond the per button price of each.

The people who tend to order these

If you are the volunteer coordinator. You are the one who will end up counting these into envelopes, so decide your split by design before you order, not after. One order, one shipping charge, and a note to yourself about who collects or where it ships.

If you are a first time candidate doing your own printing. Start with the 2.25 inch. It is the middle size, it carries a name and a short line of text without crowding, and at $1.99 flat you can work out any quantity you like on a phone calculator before committing.

If you are the treasurer. The published rate for each band is the reason your estimate and your invoice will match. Multiply the count by the size price, add one shipping tier, and that is the number, before tax.

If you are ordering on behalf of a group spread across several neighbouring places. Consolidate. The tier rewards one order, and the difference between a $19.99 and a $24.99 tier is decided by the total count, so the person assembling the list should be the person placing the order.

Questions that come up on campaign orders

Does the per button price drop if our Setauket committee goes from 250 buttons to 1000? Yes, within a single size. 250 of one size pays 25 percent under the listed rate, and 1000 of one size is a quote rather than an automatic price. Ten prices itself at the listed rate, and 1000 of one size goes to a quote instead of an automatic price. The discount is worked out per size and applied automatically.

Our Setauket order landed on 501 buttons. Is there any reason to cut it to 500? Yes, $5.00. At 501 you are in the $24.99 tier. At 500 you are in the $19.99 tier. If you do not have a use for the 501st button, drop it.

Can a volunteer collect a Setauket order in Huntington instead of us paying for shipping? Yes. Local pickup is free and there is no shipping charge on a collected order. Whoever collects does not need to be the person who placed the order, so long as they know the order name.

We want three designs for one Setauket canvass. Does that have to be three orders? No, and it should not be. Put all three on one order and the shipping tier is calculated on the combined button count, which is almost always cheaper than three separate charges.

If our Setauket group adds more buttons after we have already ordered, does the second order get its own shipping charge? Yes. A second order is a separate order, with its own tier based on its own count. If you can see the addition coming, add it to the first order instead.