If you are involved in youth
sports as a parent, coach, booster club member, or just interested
in making sports buttons for youth organizations, you should
definitely take a few moments and learn how easy and how profitable
it can be to make great-looking sports buttons with our Sports
Designs CDs, available exclusively from Dr. Don's Buttons.
TRUE STORY... A number of years ago, a woman asked
me to make buttons for the booster club to sell at sports events
at her son's school. In the process, I discovered the value of
making personalized buttons. They sold better and for more money
than buttons that had a generic statement like "Go Team!"
Back then, before I had graphic
artists working for me, the challenge I faced in making this
type of button was creating the design. I didn't have a graphic
arts background and most of our customers don't either. But now,
with the release of our Sports Button Designs CDs, it's easy
to create this type of button because you don't have to create
the design yourself. We've done it for you.
Making this type of button can be very profitable. One of my
favorite stories involved a friend of the woman who first asked
me to make sports booster buttons. After seeing the personalized
buttons I made for her friend's booster club, she decided her
daughter's school would have them, too.
She asked me to create buttons for their Varsity, Junior Varsity,
and Freshman football and volleyball teams. During the next 6
weeks, she ordered 800 buttons for just over $1200. Not only
were these buttons profitable for me, they made money for the
booster club as well. They sold those 800 buttons for $4.00 each!
To give you an idea just how easy making this type of button
can be, several examples are shown in the table below. On the
left side of the table are several templates in their "raw
state", as you would find them on their respective CD. And
on the right, how the button might look like after you have added
just a few words of text.
from Sports Designs
Basketball CD |
 |
from Sports Designs
Soccer CD |
 |
from Sports Designs
Football CD |
 |
from Sports Designs
Volleyball CD |
|
from Sports Designs
Baseball / Softball CD |
 |
Making this type of button can be very profitable!
One of my favorite stories that demonstrates just how profitable
they can be involved a friend of the woman who first asked me
to make sports booster buttons. Her daughter attended another
high school and after she saw the personalized sports buttons
I made for her friend's booster club, she decided her daughter's
school would have them, too.
She asked me to create buttons for their Varsity, Junior Varsity,
and Freshman football teams, as well as for their volleyball
teams. And during the course of the next 6 weeks, the orders
she placed totaled just over $1200.
While making these buttons was profitable for me, it was VERY
profitable for their booster club, since they sold the 800 buttons
I made for them for $4.00 each!!
That meant their booster club earned a profit of nearly $2000
by selling the buttons to the parents and grandparents of the
students who attended the games!
Getting Started
To get started, the booster club provided me with a roster of
all the teams and asked me to make two personalized buttons for
each player. We discovered the parents wouldn't let their child's
button go unclaimed and rarely did we make a button for a player
that wasn't sold.
Learning this helped me when I approached other schools.
That's because I sometimes encountered hesitancy on the part
of booster clubs to try something new... something that might
entail a financial risk.
The booster clubs I talked with weren't always willing to take
a chance to see if these buttons would do as well at their school
as they had at the schools I previously mentioned. So to counter
their reluctance, I made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
I offered them a money-back guarantee.
If they let me make two personalized buttons for each player
on the roster, I guaranteed to buy back any buttons that didn't
sell.
That usually did the trick, since they now had everything to
gain... and nothing to lose.
And I have to tell you... rarely did I ever have to buy back
a personalized button that I made using the school roster. But
the few I did buy back were more than off-set by the hundreds
of buttons that did sell.
All in all, I found the money-back guarantee to be a great way
to market this type of button to school booster clubs.
After the initial go-round where I made two buttons for each
player on the team, the booster club would take orders for any
additional buttons that friends or family members might want.
This turned out to be another good source for orders and additional
income, since a player's brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and
grandparents might also want to have a button.
To date, the largest re-order we had for a single player's button
was 13. He must have had a very large family!
I didn't offer the money-back guarantee on re-orders, since these
were actual orders and not done on speculation.
The profit potential in making personalized sports buttons
is INCREDIBLE!!
Now, I'd like to have you take a careful look at the profit
potential that is possible doing this type of button. I'll use
two scenarios. The first scenario will be if you are selling
the buttons to a booster club; the second, if you are booster
club making the buttons for your own school or team.
Scenario 1 - making
and selling buttons to a booster club
Let's say that you have your
own button machine and you were to receive an order for 100 personalized
sports booster buttons and then sold them to the booster club
for $1.50 each, as I did.
100 x $1.50 would equal $150.00 in total sales.
Next, we need to determine the cost of the supplies to make those
100 buttons.
You can purchase 1000 2-1/4" pin-back button sets from Dr.
Don's Buttons for $109.95 (plus
shipping). When purchased in this quantity, the cost of the button
parts would work out to be just about 13¢ each. (13¢
x 100 = $13.00)
Next, we need to factor in the cost of printing the designs that
will be used to make the buttons.
If you're using an inkjet printer, that would be the cost of
the ink and paper. Let's say that averaged out to 5¢ per
design. (5¢ x 100 = $5.00)
So the cost of making 100 buttons, using this scenario, would
be $18.00. $13.00 for the parts and $5.00 for the printing.
$150.00 - $18.00 = $132.00
Using these figures, your net profit on that one order of 100
buttons would be $132.00.
To determine how much you would actually earn per hour, simply
divide the amount of time you would spend making the buttons
into the amount of profit you would earn.
You know it is going to take a certain amount of time to set-up
your button designs with the appropriate text. In the beginning,
this will take a little more time, but once you have them ready,
it's easy to save them and use them as templates. Then all you
have to do is change the school's name, the color of the text,
the team name, etc. for each school you work with.
When your templates are finished, just personalize the button
designs with the school name / team name / player's name and/or
their jersey number and print out the necessary number of designs
you need for each player.
This would likely take 60-90 minutes. Let's be conservative and
say it takes you 90 minutes.
After the printing is finished, just make the buttons.
Some button machines can only make one button or badge a minute,
(which works out to 60 buttons per hour), but our Model
225 button machine is capable of producing 4-5 buttons
per minute!
So if you have a good button machine, it might take twenty to
thirty minutes to produce 100 buttons.
Next, you will need to verify each button and make certain you
have the right number of buttons for those who ordered them,
that all the names have been spelled correctly, and the right
jersey number is on each button.
Let's add another 15 minutes to do that.
So, for this example, the total amount of time needed to create
100 personalized sports buttons would be 90 minutes for the set-up
and printing, 20 minutes for the actual button production, and
15 minutes for the verification.
About 2 hours total.
If you divide the $132 profit by the 2 hours you would spend
doing the buttons, the amount you would earn would be $66.00 per hour.
Not too bad for a home based business, is it?
Scenario 2 - a booster
club making buttons for their own use
In scenario 2, everything remains
the same except that since you are eliminating the middle man,
the amount of profit earned would be far greater. Let's say your
booster club sells the 150 buttons for the conservative amount
of $3.00 each. That would, of course, total $450 in sales.
$450.00 - $18.00 = $432.00
In this scenario, the net profit for the booster club would be
an astounding $432!
It would still take about two hours to create the buttons, but
the booster club would have to actually sell the buttons. However,
booster clubs usually have lots of volunteers who attend the
games anyway, so this task can be spread out amongst the members
and wouldn't actually add anything to the cost.
In addition to templates where you might add a player's name
/ jersey number to create a personalized sports button, our Sports
Designs CDs also contain templates where you don't need to
add player's names or jersey numbers, and this type of button
can be incredibly profitable, too.
In the example
above, you simply add the school name to the template and you
have a great-looking, highly marketable button design that can
be sold at the game along side the personalized buttons.
At Dr. Don's Buttons, we charge $109.95 for 100 2-1/4"
buttons
done in this manner.
So for this
scenario, let's say you were to create 100 buttons just like
this and only had to spend 5 minutes adding the school's name
to the template to create the design we will use.
In this instance,
the total amount of time necessary to design and make these buttons
would be about 25 minutes.
The cost of
the materials to make the buttons would be the same as in the
previous example, $18.00.
To determine
the profit in this instance, you simply take the $109.95 (if
that's what you were charge your customer), subtract $18.00 for
the button parts and printing, leaving a net profit of $91.95.
But since you
only spent 25 minutes completing this order, you would be earning
over $200.00 an hour in this scenario.
Again, not
too shabby!
The Sports
Designs CDs we currently offer
Shown
below are the various Sports Designs CDs we currently offer.
We have CDs for Soccer, Football, Basketball, Baseball / Softball,
and Volleyball. And coming soon, we will have Cheerleader Sports
Designs and a Miscellaneous Sports Designs CD.
You
can receive any one of our Sports Designs CDs
