Custom Die-Cut Stickers for West Islip, New York

The first thing worth settling on a West Islip order is whether you intend to come and get the buttons yourself or have them sent to you, because at this end of the south shore both answers are honest ones and the deciding factor is usually just whether making the trip suits you. Collection costs nothing. Shipping is a flat fee set only by how many buttons are on the order, not by where the order is going. Neither choice moves the price of the buttons themselves by a cent, so you can work out the artwork and the quantity first and leave this decision until the end.

Putting a number on the trip

West Islip sits 13.1 miles south east of the shop in a straight line. That is the real figure, measured point to point, and not a claim about roads or routes. It is far enough that nobody should feel obliged to collect, and close enough that people who are already heading north for something else often do. The 11795 ZIP is served the same way as the rest of Suffolk County: the flat shipping tiers below apply, and the per button price is identical whether the box travels thirteen miles or three hundred.

If you are putting an order together for a conference or a trade show, the useful way to think about it is that the two options cost different amounts of your attention, not different amounts per button. Shipping adds one flat line to the total. Collection removes that line and adds a trip.

A tight ring of neighbours

Something genuinely unusual shows up when you look at what surrounds this ZIP. Babylon is 1.6 miles away. Brightwaters is 1.9. West Bay Shore is 2.0. North Babylon is 2.2. West Babylon is 2.7. All five of the nearest places we also cover sit inside a 2.7 mile band, which is a tighter cluster than most of the towns on this site have around them. Few of the other pages on this site describe a ring of covered neighbours packed as close as the one around West Islip.

That matters for one practical reason. If two or three people are ordering buttons for the same event and they happen to be spread across those neighbouring places, there is no arithmetic reason to keep the orders separate. The flat shipping tier is charged per order and counted on the total number of buttons, so combining into a single order and dividing the boxes yourselves puts one shipping fee on the job instead of three. Look up the rate for your count of that size, multiply once, and add the single shipping charge.

Five sizes, and the count that sets the rate

We make round pin-back buttons in five sizes and nothing else. The two smallest are the 1 inch at $1.49 and the 1.25 inch at $1.69.

The 1.5 inch button is $1.89 each. It is the small one, the size that reads as a lapel pin rather than a statement, and it takes a logo or a short line of type without crowding.

The 2.25 inch button is $1.99 each. This is the workhorse for handouts. It holds a logo plus a word or two, or a single graphic with room around it, and it is large enough to be legible on a lanyard or a bag strap from a few feet away.

The 3 inch button is $2.49 each. Use it when the artwork has real detail in it, or when you want the thing to be hard to miss across a hall.

All five are printed full colour from artwork you upload. The important thing about those five numbers is that each one is the rate up to ninety-nine of its own size. Those two counts are priced differently now: one at the listed rate, and a thousand of a single size at a quote rather than an automatic figure. 20 percent comes off at 100 of one size, 25 percent at 250 and 30 percent at 500. Two figures move as the count grows: the rate band for each size, and the shipping tier for the order as a whole.

What an actual order comes to

Here is a worked example rather than a range. Take 101 of the 2.25 inch button at $1.59 each, the 100 to 249 band, earned by that size's own count. The buttons come to $160.59. An order of that size falls into the $14.99 flat shipping tier, so the order total is $175.58 before tax.

The tiers, counted on total buttons across the whole 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

Now look again at that example. The order is one button over a tier boundary. Dropping the count from 101 to 100 keeps it in the $9.99 tier and takes $5.00 off the postage, which is more than the single button was worth. The buttons themselves are $1.59 each either way, because 100 and 101 both sit in the 100 to 249 band, so nothing about the unit price is in play here. It is purely the tier. Whenever your quantity lands at 101, or 251, or 501, it is worth asking whether you actually need that last one.

Getting the artwork right for a hand out

Full colour printing means the file you upload is what gets printed, so the decisions that matter are made before the order. For booth handouts the usual failure is type that was designed to be read on a monitor and then reduced to two and a quarter inches. A logo with a tagline under it often loses the tagline entirely at that size. Either drop the small type or move up to the 3 inch.

The other thing worth checking is the edge. A round button wraps over its rim, so anything sitting right at the boundary of the artwork curves away from the viewer. Keep the parts you care about toward the middle and let the background do the wrapping.

Four people ordering for the same hall

If you are exhibiting on your own and staffing a single table, you are usually ordering one design in one size. The 2.25 inch at $1.99 is the default for that job, and the thing to watch is the tier boundary rather than the quantity itself.

If you are sending a team, consider two sizes on one order. Staff wear the 1.5 inch so their badges stay uncluttered, and the 3 inch goes on the table as the giveaway. The shipping tier counts every button on the order regardless of size, so splitting across sizes costs nothing extra in postage.

If you are sharing a booth with a partner organisation, each of you can bring your own design and put them on one order. Two designs, one shipping fee, and each size still charged at its own count and so its own rate.

If you are speaking on a panel rather than running a table, the maths is different because your quantity is small. There is no minimum that unlocks a better rate and no penalty for a short run, so order the number of people you expect to hand one to and leave it there.

Questions that come up

Does collecting a West Islip order save me anything on the total? It removes the flat shipping line entirely. On an order of 101 buttons that is $14.99 off the total. The rate falls in steps rather than on a curve, at 100, 250 and 500 of a size.

My West Islip quantity worked out to 101 buttons. Should I adjust it? Almost certainly yes, if you can live with 100. The 101st button costs $1.99 but pushes the order from the $9.99 tier to the $14.99 tier, a $5.00 swing in postage for one extra button.

I am in West Islip and my co-exhibitor is in West Babylon. Can we combine into one order? Yes, and it is worth doing. One order means one flat shipping fee counted on the combined button total, and you divide the boxes between yourselves afterwards. The per button rate is unaffected by combining.

Does the price per button drop if my West Islip order is large? No. Quantity moves the rate, but only within a single size and only at three points. Only the shipping tier responds to quantity.

Can one West Islip order carry all five sizes? Yes. Each size is charged at its own ladder, climbed on its own count, and the shipping tier is worked out from the total count across every size on the order.