Company
October 16, 2023
Custom pins are a great way of promoting your business, brand, or event. All while giving you an avenue to express your creative flair and style. Custom enamel pins are particularly great for such purposes. Hard or soft enamel included. Many people want to collect pins, or even create them but have no idea how. Finding where to start and knowing how much it will cost doesn’t need to be a secret any longer. This article will walk you through every step of creating your custom pins. By the end, you will be a certified pin expert. Almost.
You could try to make the pins yourself, but you wouldn’t have much success. Enamel pins are molded metal made. Simply put, molten metal is poured into molds and then set to create the shape of the pin. To do this at home you would need a high-temperature kiln and all the necessary safety equipment. This doesn’t even include the design aspect.Many custom pins are not painted. Metals are hammered or cast into the molded pin to give it both texture and depth. If enamel pins are painted, you probably don’t have the correct paints or tools to make them keep their color/finish.Lastly, pins are cured to give them a smooth finish. To make one pin yourself it might take you an entire day of work. Now imagine you need to make a thousand! That’s why it should be left to the professionals, they will cover the manufacturing of the pin. So long as you handle the bulk of the design.
Now, you’ve settled on a manufacturer for your pins. Ignoring price and time constraints, for now, let’s look at what you will need to do from start to finish to ensure you get the pin you are looking for. Every company is slightly different, so there may be a few nuanced differences here and there. Though, for the most part, the steps will be the same more or less pretty much everywhere you go. We can help at PinProsPlus.
First, you will want to decide the tangible of the pin. The size, shape, material, etc. Most pins are made of iron, with an enamel finish. From there, you can further slim it down to hard or soft enamel. Harder is smoother and sleeker, soft is rougher but takes color better. Which enamel is best for you is a case by case decision that you will need to make for yourself. Size is not an issue, as pins can vary in size greatly. But it is something your manufacturer will need to know early on. Bigger pins will cost more, to cover material costs, but the difference is minimal. The shape comes next, what shape your pin is probably has a lot to do with the purpose. Are you promoting your brand? Well, then the brand logo. Perhaps a circle pin would be ideal.
Next comes design. Here’s the fun part. Your design needs to be clear, concise, and workable. Don’t send the manufacturer an incredibly intricate design and then ask them to make it as hard enamel pins. One of two things will happen – either they say yes, and do a poor job because of hard enamel limitations, or they say no. The more color, and the more vibrancy you want, will factor in to cost in most cases. Again, the price will only go up by a few cents per pin. But it adds up.
Next, you will want to consider quantity. Most manufacturers off discounts when you are buying in bulk. The cost per unit for each pin can decrease by as much as 70% when your quantity starts to get into the thousands rather than hundreds. So long as you consider how many pins you need properly you should be fine. It will still cost you more overall for more pins. So don’t buy more than you need just for the discount. Just as when you go to the store and see something on sale, buying it doesn’t save you money if you never planned to buy said thing in the first place.
There is never a design fee with PinProsPlus. We have artists on hand to help you design your pin. If you want to hire someone out of house to do the design, then going on places such as Upwork or Fiver can help you find a good graphic designer for just a few bucks an hour to get the idea down. However, we would still need to adjust the design to make it producible.
The price per unit of custom pins varies greatly. If you are buying 100 pins from Company A, it might cost you $300. It could cost you twice as much from company B. However, as quantities go up prices tend to even out between manufacturers. Of course, material matters too. It is a good idea to get a quote from the manufacturers before you pull the trigger on any sort of deal.
So, hopefully, you now have a pretty good idea about the steps you must go through to create your custom pin. It can be as easy or difficult as you make it, with ease comes price but that’s the case in almost everything we do.
