Little Known Secrets of Custom Lapel Pins

In most any industry, there are shadowy origins, trade secrets and need-to-know information that remains hidden by the scenes. All you see is a squeaky clean, polished customer oriented front of house and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the time we don’t need to know the intricate details of how a business operates but it can be quite interesting regardless. So what lies behind the façade of a custom lapel pin company?

CUSTOM PINS ARE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY HAND MADE

We have been accustomed to think that manufacturing has been taken over by automation with robot arms handling goods and conveyer belts delivering them around a factory floor. Indeed, this is how we have modernized our industrial base but it usually only applies to producing one type of good in numbers of hundreds to thousands. That sheer volume makes it economical to design, program and build an entire complex dedicated to making one product. Custom lapel pins are just that, custom. With orders ranging from a hundred pins to a couple thousand on the other end of the spectrum, it wouldn’t make sense to try to automate production of this small of a run of product. This, of course, means that custom pins are made by hand – almost exclusively. With each pin having a unique layout of colors, it creates difficulty when thinking up a machine that could paint dozens of different orders a day with an error free accuracy even when filling colors in areas a millimeter in area. Other areas of manufacturing a pin, such as metal platings and epoxy coatings need a human touch to ensure a quality end product because of the finicky nature of these processes. 

VERY FEW CUSTOM ENAMEL PINS ARE MADE IN THE WESTERN WORLD

Regardless of what you may read or hear, there’s not a large likelihood your custom pins are made in the North America or Europe. I think we would all love to see pins stamped with “Made in the USA” but as described previously, the are incredible intensive to manufacture. There are some purchasers of pins that require pins to be made in country due to their organization’s restrictions and rules and some custom pin companies skirt around this obstacle by simply claiming to make their pins here in America but its probably not entirely true.

THERE AREN’T PRECIOUS METALS IN YOUR CUSTOM PINS

You may come across companies saying they offer 24K or 14K gold metal platings or Sterling Silver metals for their custom pins. Unfortunately they might not be telling you the entire truth. If you were to ask them to provide documentation of their precious metal claims, not many would be able to comply especially when considering the products would be under more intense US Customs scrutiny as well. Technical names may be gold tone platings for “gold” pins. “Silver” pins can be plated with zinc or nickel to get close to the white metal look of real Sterling Silver. Are there cases where real precious metals are used in custom pins? Yes, especially if you are purchasing from a mint-like entity.