Custom Pin-Back Buttons for Westhampton Clubs and Societies

The person placing a club button order is usually a secretary, a chapter officer or a volunteer who has been handed the membership list, working to turn a crest and a year into something every member can put on a lapel. They are almost never a designer. They have a logo file somebody made once, a rough count of who will turn up, and a figure they have to report back to a committee that will ask what it came to. This page is written for that order: round pin-back buttons, full colour, printed from artwork you upload, in one of five sizes and nothing else.

Five sizes and what each one carries

The range is 1 inch, 1.25 inch, 1.5 inch, 2.25 inch and 3 inch. All round, all pin-back, all printed edge to edge in full colour.

The 1.5 inch button is the one most clubs land on for general member pins. It holds a crest, a monogram or a simple mark cleanly at a size that reads as a member pin rather than as a badge. The 2.25 inch gives you room for a crest plus one readable line of text, which is usually the club name or a year. The 3 inch is the one to choose when the design has to carry more than that: an office held, a founding year, a dedication, or a photograph that needs to be recognisable from across a room.

Prices are $1.89 each for the 1.5 inch, $1.99 each for the 2.25 inch and $2.49 each for the 3 inch. Add the 1 inch at $1.49 and the 1.25 inch at $1.69 to that list, which are the two to reach for on a giveaway run.

What a button costs at your count

This is worth stating plainly because most printed goods do not work this way. One is charged at the listed rate. A thousand of one size is the point where a person quotes it instead. From 500 to 999 of a size the rate is 30 percent under the listed one. 1,000 of a single size is quoted by a person rather than priced automatically.

The three steps are 100, 250 and 500, counted per size.

A worked order, so the number is not a guess

Take a common club order: 150 of the 1.5 inch button. At $1.51 each, the rate that applies from 100 of one size, that is $226.50 in buttons. Flat shipping for an order of that size is $14.99, so the order comes to $241.49 before tax.

That is the whole arithmetic. There is nothing else stacked underneath it, and because every band is published you can work out any other size or count the same way before you sit down with the treasurer.

Where the shipping tiers actually fall

Shipping is flat and it is set by the total number of buttons on the order, not by size and not by how many different designs are on it:

• 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 useful consequence is what happens just above a boundary. An order that crosses 100 buttons moves into the $14.99 band, and from there every additional button up to 250 adds nothing at all to the shipping charge. So a committee that has counted 100 members and then starts worrying about spares for the people who join later is already paying the higher band the moment it orders the hundred and first pin. Those extra buttons still cost their own band, set by their own count each, of course, but they do not move the shipping figure again until 250. The same logic repeats at 250 and at 500.

Five places we also cover, all close in

Westhampton sits unusually well for this. Every one of the five nearest places we cover is within 6.4 miles: Remsenburg-Speonk at 1.8 miles, East Moriches at 4.5 miles, East Quogue at 5.5 miles, Flanders at 6.0 miles and Riverhead at 6.4 miles.

That matters for clubs and societies more than it does for most customers, because a club roster rarely respects a hamlet boundary. A society that meets in one of those places and draws half its members from the others is still one order, one design, one flat shipping charge. There is no reason to split it into five smaller orders, and splitting it would only mean paying a shipping charge five times over.

Distance, and what it is useful for

The straight line distance from the shop is 38.1 miles, running east. That is worth knowing when you are deciding how an order should reach you rather than when you are deciding what to order, and it is the reason most orders out to ZIP 11977 go by post. It is a straight line figure, not a route and not a drive.

Preparing artwork for a round button

A round button is not a square design with the corners trimmed. The printed sheet wraps around the rim of the shell, so anything close to the outer edge of your circle disappears around the curve. Keep the club name, the year and any small lettering well inside the visible face, and let the background colour run out past the edge of the circle so there is no pale ring where the wrap begins.

Two practical notes for club crests specifically. Thin outlines and fine heraldic detail read more clearly at 2.25 inch and 3 inch than at 1.5 inch, so if your crest is intricate, size up rather than simplify. And if the crest was drawn to sit inside a shield or an oval, centre it inside a circle yourself before you upload it, rather than leaving the cropping to chance.

Four organisers, four different problems

The membership secretary. You have a fixed roster and a recurring job: everyone who is on the list gets a pin. Your concern is the count, not the design, because the design has not changed in years. Order to the roster, add the spares you know you will need, and watch which shipping band the total lands in.

The annual dinner organiser. You want a pin that marks this particular year rather than the club in general. The 2.25 inch is usually the right call here, because the year has to be readable and the crest still has to be recognisable.

The recruitment volunteer. You are handing pins to people who are not members yet, so the count is a guess rather than a roster. Guess high enough to clear a boundary rather than sitting just under one, because 100, 250 and 500 of a size are where the per button rate steps down as well as where the postage steps up.

The small chapter officer. Your roster moves. You order in smaller batches more often, and the per button rate you can look up means you are not penalised for it. Your only real cost of ordering in batches is paying the shipping charge each time, so pooling two batches into one order is the saving available to you.

Questions organisers ask before they order

Does ordering more pins for a Westhampton club bring the price per button down? No. A hundred of one size is the first point where the per button figure drops. Nothing about a larger order changes it.

Our Westhampton society wants 150 of the 1.5 inch button. What is the total? $226.50 for the buttons, plus $14.99 flat shipping for an order of that size, which is $241.49 before tax.

If a Westhampton committee needs a little more than 250 buttons, what does that do to the cost? The buttons themselves stay at the same rate each. The order moves into the next flat shipping band, at $19.99, and stays there all the way up to 500 buttons.

Can one Westhampton order include more than one size, or more than one design? Yes. Each button is charged at the published rate for its own size, and the shipping band is set by the total number of buttons on the order rather than by the number of sizes or designs on it.

Our members are split between Westhampton and Remsenburg-Speonk. Should we place two orders? There is no cost reason to. Two orders of two hundred are two counts of two hundred, while one order of four hundred is a single count of four hundred and sits a band lower.