Eight Facts to drive home the sales of badges and buttons
(plus, the lowdown on lanyards …)It’s nearly impossible to prepare an article on badges and buttons without at least one reference to flair. Yes, “flair”—a term made famous by the 1991 cult comedy Office Space. In the movie, Jennifer Aniston plays a long-suffering waitress who gets chided by her boss for not adorning her T.G.I. Friday’s-esque suspenders with enough buttons, or flair. As he explains: “They come to Chotchkie’s for the atmosphere and the attitude. OK? That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun.” And with that, flair’s place in the cultural lexicon was secured.
Cut to 2008. With nary a be-buttoned suspender to be found, can a distributor still sell the “it’s a party with a pin” angle? Maybe. But with the facts below coloring a sales pitch, who needs it? These eight are all the flair a distributor needs to sell badges or buttons.
1. Buttons require some fancy handiwork.
For a quick rundown on button creation, according to Dino Bartolomei, vice president at Broadview, Illinois-based Adco Litho Line, the design is printed on paper, then laminated, die-cut, put over a piece of steel (a shell) and finally crimped together with a back that has a pin in it. But with all the steps in the process, and in spite of the finished product’s simple appearance, “There’s labor involved no matter how you do a button. There’s a lot of hand labor,” he affirmed.
2. The shipping news is good for badges.
Most badges are lighter in weight and less substantial than buttons. “Say 1,000 2¼” buttons weight 32 pounds, that same 1,000 [badges]—relative in the amount of square inches—can weigh 10 pounds. The shipping [costs for badges] is much better,” Bartolomei revealed.
3. Buttons are cost-effective in large amounts.
Overall, he noted, at quantities upwards of 100,000, button costs come way down. They have a greater price reduction because of reaw materials used (steel as opposed to plastic), Bartolomei explained.
On the other hand, even at this volume, the price for badges stays relatively steady. For this reason, in the big campaigns, buttons continue to reign supreme.
4. Badges are the stuff collections are made of.
“We do lapel pins, which some people call badges,” contributed Jim Brown, vice president of AAA Line, Niagara Falls, N.Y. He added, “This is a fairly big market.”
The sheer size of the end-buyer pool has to do with the number of collectors our there as well as companies and organizations such a Disney or Major League Baseball capitalizing on this niche by having exclusive pins created for trading purposes.
“If you went to Disneyland, they have a room in one of the pavilions where they actually trade them. … People come and sit at tables and they participate in the whole lapel-pin marketplace,” said Brown. “It’s quite amazing.”
5. Imagination can get (almost) free rein with badge designs.
Fun fact: It’s unbelievable to consider, but it costs a pretty penny to build a die for a button that’s not yet in existence. “Those dies are in the thousands of dollars, like tens of thousands [of] dollars,” Bartolomei laughed as he related a story of how a distributor was in such disbelief at the staggering dollar amount, he hung up on him. On the badge side, a new die costs a tiny fraction of that. “That’s why, with a badge, it’s virtually endless the amount of shapes you can do,” he said.
6. They can light up a room
By now, flashing badges and light-up buttons are de rigueur, but they still are able to draw a crowd. For collectors, “They fetch mare than non-blinking pins as a trader,” Brown related.
A newer technology that has Bartolomei duly impressed is buttons that can play a digital-camera chip (such as an XD) on video screen. “Electronics are trying to move into this, [by] taking the simple and making it cooler,” he said.
7. They’re often the last to join the party.
Even with exciting advances, badges and buttons have the stigma of being a bit of an afterthought. They might maintain a strong foothold in the political arena, but in most cases, “Not a lot of people are going to come to you and say, ‘We want buttons,’” Bartolomei stated. One way distributors can combat this, however, is by asking the right questions and suggesting buttons as a program enhancement from the get-go.
8. From the design perspective, less is always more
Simple verbiage, a two- or three-color palette and a lot of white space will maximize the marketing effects of a button or badge. “End-users want to put a ton of stuff on a button [but] you gotta remember whoever’s reading that button isn’t going to be two inches [away] reading it,” Bartolomei said. “It’s usually a glance.”
