Custom Pin-Back Buttons for Southampton, NY

North Sea sits 3.8 miles off, Noyack 7.6 miles, and Hampton Bays, East Quogue and Cutchogue all fall inside a ring that closes at 10.6 miles, which makes those five places near neighbours of one another as much as they are of anywhere else. We cover all of them, and we cover the ZIP codes 11968 and 11969 in Suffolk County too.

That geography shapes how a button order tends to get written here. A volunteer team based in Southampton is usually not thinking about a single street or a single ZIP code. It is thinking about a handful of named places that happen to be a short hop from one another, and about how many people it needs to put a badge on. The order that results is usually one order with one design rather than five small ones, and the numbers below are written with that in mind.

Five neighbours inside eleven miles

The useful fact about this cluster is that no neighbour on our list is further than 10.6 miles from the others. North Sea at 3.8 miles is the closest. Hampton Bays at 7.1 and Noyack at 7.6 sit in the middle. East Quogue at 9.8 and Cutchogue at 10.6 close it out. For a canvassing operation that is one coordination problem, not five, and it is the reason we push people toward pooling a run rather than splitting it.

Pooling matters because of how shipping works. 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. What it does buy you is one flat shipping charge instead of several. Five separate orders of forty buttons each pay the flat shipping tier five times over. One order of two hundred buttons pays it once. That is the whole argument for consolidating, and it is an argument about shipping, not about the buttons.

How far east you actually are

The straight line distance from our shop to Southampton is 52.6 miles, due east. That is a line on a map, not a route and not a duration. We mention it because people ask where we are relative to them before they ask anything else, and because it is the one number on this page that is about geography rather than money.

Five sizes, and what each is good for

We make round pin-back buttons in five diameters and nothing else.

The 1.5 inch button is $1.89 each. It is the small one, and it holds a short word or two, a simple mark, a set of initials. It reads at conversation distance.

The 2.25 inch button is $1.99 each. This is the size most people picture when they picture a campaign button. A name and a year fit comfortably. A name, a year, and a short line of text fit if the type is set sensibly.

The 3 inch button is $2.49 each. It is the one that carries a slogan, a portrait, or a logo with real detail in it. It is also the one people notice across a room.

All five are printed full colour from artwork you upload. Forty of the 2.25 inch costs $1.99 each, and four hundred of it costs $1.49 each, which is the 250 to 499 rate. The honest advice is to order your real headcount and then check one thing: whether a single size is sitting just under 100, 250 or 500.

What a real order adds up to

Here is a worked example rather than a range. Forty of the 3 inch button at $2.49 each is $99.60 in buttons. An order of that size falls in the first flat shipping tier at $9.99. The total is $109.59 before tax.

The shipping tiers go by the total number of buttons on the order, not by weight and not by what is on them:

• 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 boundary worth watching

The order has two step functions in it now, the rate band and the shipping tier. The first one is at 100. An order of 100 buttons ships at $9.99. An order of 104 ships at $14.99. The four extra buttons cost you $5.00 in shipping on top of their own price.

If you are sitting at 104, you have two sensible options. Trim to 100 and pay the lower tier, or go on up toward 250, where the $14.99 you are already paying gets spread across a lot more buttons. The one thing not worth doing is stopping just past a boundary. The same logic applies at 250 and at 500.

Getting artwork ready

You upload the art and we print it. Full colour, no separate charge per ink, no limit on how many colours are in the file. A photograph is as printable as a flat two-colour mark.

The thing worth doing before you upload is deciding what has to be legible and what is decoration. On a 1.5 inch button, a candidate name and nothing else is a reasonable brief. On a 3 inch button you have room for a name, an office and a tagline, but the temptation is to use all of it. Leave a margin. The very edge of a round button curves away from the eye, so anything pushed right to the rim gets harder to read than it looked on screen.

Four people who usually end up placing this order

The volunteer coordinator. You are counting heads, not designing anything. Your only real decisions are size and quantity, and your quantity should land at or below a tier line rather than just over it. Count the people you expect, add the ones who show up anyway, then check where that number falls against the 100 and 250 marks.

The person doing the artwork. You want to know the printable area before you commit to a layout. Pick the diameter first, set the type at that size, and look at it at actual scale on paper before you upload anything.

The treasurer. You want a line item you can write down without a caveat. The ladder has four rungs per size and the lowest online one is 500 to 999. Multiply, add the tier, and that is the figure, before tax.

The person working a table. You are handing these out and you want them to be picked up. Bigger reads from further away, which is the argument for the 3 inch. Smaller means more of them for the same spend, which is the argument for the 1.5 inch. Most tables end up carrying two sizes.

Questions people in Southampton ask us

Do I get a better per-button price if my Southampton canvass orders in bulk? Yes, and it is worth knowing where the steps are. 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. There is a discount at 100 of a size, a better one at 250 and the best online one at 500. Those two counts are priced differently now: a hundred at 20 percent under the listed rate, and a thousand of a single size at a quote rather than an automatic figure. The rate band answers to one size's count and the shipping tier answers to the total.

Our volunteers are spread across Southampton, North Sea and Hampton Bays. Should we place one order or three? One. Three orders means paying the flat shipping tier three times. Designs at the same size pool for the discount and different sizes never do, so a mixed order does not combine its way into a band.

What does an order of 40 of the 3 inch button come to for a Southampton group? $99.60 in buttons at $2.49 each, plus $9.99 flat shipping, so $109.59 before tax.

Which button size should a Southampton campaign table use? It depends on reading distance. The 3 inch at $2.49 carries a slogan or a portrait and is visible across a room. The 2.25 inch at $1.99 is the traditional campaign size and handles a name and a year. The 1.5 inch at $1.89 works for a name alone. The 1 inch is the smallest at $1.49 each, and the 1.25 inch sits just above it at $1.69.

How far is Southampton from you? 52.6 miles in a straight line, to the east. That is map distance, not a route.