Last year, our team made over 3 thousand buttons with our school’s button maker. Throughout the season, I dedicated an insane amount of time to making buttons, while also juggling a million other things. We tried to hand out the workload amongst more team members, but it made students less enthusiastic about coming to practice and led to other problems. This year I have absolutely no time to continue the never-ending process and would rather not force students to make them.
This leads me to my current predicament of what do I do now… Our team has voted in favor of continuing to make buttons for comps so not making them isn’t an option. I have also looked within a 150-mile radius of our city to see if any design companies make custom buttons, but there weren’t any. Currently, I am debating which website to purchase them through. However, most websites are asking for an insane amount of money or are extremely sketchy.
This leads me to my main question: what website/company does your team use to purchase custom buttons?
A significant question for this is what size buttons you’re planning to make. There are fairly standard fractional inch sizes, but there are also unique “Badge-A-Minit” sizes that are close to others but don’t quite work.
Edit: Maybe I misunderstand. Are you looking to source the materials, or source pre-made custom buttons?
While it isn’t the answer to your question, I feel like you should heavily consider making fewer buttons. 3k seems very excessive, and i feel like 500 buttons is more than enough, and also not entirely difficult to do within the team. Outsourcing buttons will be expensive.
We’ve used purebuttons.com for years. Quality and turnaround time is good, and if you have the flexibility to spend a bigger chunk at once up front there are significant discounts for bulk ordering. Also automatic discounts for reorders.
American Button Machines used to support FIRST Robotics with great discounts on materials and software but is sadly not the case now. However, they have lots of options if you are willing to make your own. I’m not sure if they do pre-made ones. Still a good option in my opinion.
The other thing that I will add is that if the team wants to do buttons again, then the team helps. Period. Our team members have made great memories around the table making buttons.
I’d also agree that 3,000 seems to be a very high number. Over the past few years, we’ve been keeping a rough track of how many buttons we give away at each event. 250-300 per district competition (about 40 teams per). 500-600 for DCMP (FiM). And about the same for Champs when we go. So, for a full season, we make roughly 1,800, maybe 2,000 buttons. If we run out at an event, that’s fine.
Could not agree more in regards to the excess amount of buttons! We are scaling down to about 750 buttons - 250 for various community outreach events and 500 for regionals!
Just an observation, but if you put out a lot of buttons at the same time, kids tend to grab several rather than just 1. We will put out just a couple of handfuls. Enough to keep from seeing the bottom of the basket, but keep the rest hidden away until the basket starts to look a little sparse. They tend to last much longer, and we don’t see a bunch of broken/ beat up buttons laying around at the end of an event.
If you are looking for an on-line place that will sell you custom pre-made buttons, we LOVE https://www.purebuttons.com/. We are going into our 10th season and have used them for 9 of them. Best part is discount on reorders AND fast shipping.
This might be helpful even though it is not directly about buttons, but I have bought enamel pins (which look fantastic imo) from vendors on Alibaba. They work with you on a physical proof (that you approve) then sell to you in bulk with a pretty quick turnaround. We saw the pins and liked the look of them even though they were more expensive compared to buttons. Additionally if you plan on buying the same pin year to year they offer discounts and remove the mold costs. Yielding costs that are fairly reasonable:
I did the math a while ago mostly as a joke, but if you live in a state that pays above federal minimum wage it’s cheaper to send the kids to work at Starbucks and buy buttons than for them to be making buttons.
That’s assuming they make under the standard deduction and factoring in buttons material costs at around 5k units. Compared to a few quotes I had for 5k buttons. 2.25" standard size.
almost mentioned that directly. We love the mule sauce at our team meals.