If you are looking for a business you can operate from the comfort of your own home, one that would be both fun and profitable, one you can start for an investment of less than $500.00, then making buttons (also known as badges) could be your answer. In this article I will share my own button-making experiences and show you how you can earn more than $66.00 an hour making buttons. Sound too good to be true? Well, it's not... and if you will give me just a few minutes of your time, I'll show you. The first time I made buttons as a business venture was back in 1991. I was attending a week-long convention of the National Association of Letter Carriers, in New Orleans. I had previously been a Letter Carrier and I took my button machine along with me to the convention in hopes of making and selling buttons to offset some of my expenses. My plan was fairly simple... I was going to set up a folding table on the sidewalk outside the convention center and sell buttons to the conventioneers as they made their way into the convention each morning... and again as they left each afternoon. To replace the buttons I sold, I would simply made more each night in my hotel room. The buttons I made had sayings that were popular with Letter Carriers; sayings like "Union Letter Carrier... and Proud of It!", "My Supervisor is Dumber than Your Supervisor" and one that simply said "National Association of Letter Carriers Convention - New Orleans, Louisiana- 1991" that could serve as an inexpensive souvenier for anyone who attended the convention. To make a long story short, I was able to sell $1800 worth of buttons ($1.50 each, or 4 for $5.00) during the five days I was at the convention. That's me on the left, in the photo above. Notice, if you will, the smile on my face and the large wad of cash in my left hand. Driving home from the convention it struck me that I just might be onto something!! A moment ago I said I would show you how to earn more than $66.00 an hour making buttons and if you are in the least bit skeptical (as I hope you are) you might be saying, "Yeah, right!" But if you will give me a few more minutes of your time, I will walk you through the process of making buttons and share with you some of the most profitable button-making concepts I have come up with. Ideas you are free to use yourself. Sports Booster Buttons One of the more profitable button-making ideas I came up with is what I call "Personalized Sports Buttons". I will use them as my first example to show you how easy... and how profitable button-making can be. Not long after the convention, a woman whose son attended a high school in our area contacted me and asked if I could make buttons for their booster club; buttons they could later resell at the games for a profit. I told her I could and the result was the concept of "Personalized Sports Buttons", samples of which you can see below. What makes these types of buttons so profitable is that they are personalized. Each button carries the name and/or jersey number of a player, as well as the name of the school and the team. Family members love this type of button and they are far more meaningful to them than a button that says "Football Mom" or "Basketball Dad". To make this type of button you start by creating a template that includes the school name and the team name. After that, just add a graphic to represent the particular sport you are working with. After you have created your template, simply enter each player's name and/or jersey number on the template. Continue repeating this process until you have buttons for all the players in the quantity you need. When I did these buttons in 1997, I sold them to the woman for $1.50 each. Their booster club then turned around and sold them to the player's parents, grandparents, and girlfriends for $3.00 - $4.00 each. I was happy, the families were happy, and the booster club was happy, too! One thing I enjoyed about this arrangement was that I didn't have to sell the buttons myself - the booster club did! (However, if you are going to the games anyway, you might be able to sell the buttons yourself and significantly increase the amount of profit you earn) Determining Your Costs and Profit When you do buttons in this manner, here's how you determine what your costs would be and the amount of profit you would earn. Let's say you received an order for 100 personalized Sports Buttons and sold them for $2.00 each (you are free to charge whatever you wish, but when someone asks us to produce them now, that's what we typically charge). 100 x $2.00 equals $200.00 in total sales. (With football teams, where you may have 50 or more players per team, an order of 100 buttons is totally realistic. And don't forget... most high schools have Freshman, Junior Varsity and Varsity teams). The next step is to determine the cost of the supplies you will need to make 100 buttons. You can purchase 1000 2-1/4" pin-back button sets from my company, Dr. Don's Buttons, Badges and More, for $89.95, plus shipping. If shipping was $20.00, that would put the price with shipping at $109.95. That price also includes a FREE copy of any Sports Design CD we offer. With any of these CDs, making sports buttons is a snap). Purchased in a quantity of 1000, the cost per button would work out to be 11 cents each. (11 cents x 100 = $11.00) Next, we need to factor in the cost of printing the designs. If you're using an inkjet printer, that would be the cost of your ink and paper. Let's say that averaged out to be 5 cents per design. (5 cents x 100 = $5.00) So the cost of materials to make 100 buttons would be about $18.00. $200.00 - $13.00 = $187.00 In this example, your net profit would be $187.00. Now, to determine how much you would be earning per hour, divide the time you spend making the buttons into the amount of profit you earned. You know it will take a certain amount of time to design your buttons. In the beginning, it will take a bit more time to create your designs. But after you have created a design, it's easy to save it as a template so the next time you want to make buttons, you simply change the school name and team name for each school you are working with. When your template is ready then all you need to do is type in the player's name (and if applicable, their jersey number) with your graphics program and print the necessary number of designs for each player. This might take 60-90 minutes. Let's say it takes you 75 minutes. After you have finished printing you designs, you now need to cut them from the printed sheets and make your buttons. Inexpensive button machines, like those produced by Badge-A-Minit, are able to produce about one button or badge a minute, (60 buttons per hour). They also have a tendency to produce poor quality buttons (where the edge of the paper design or plastic covering may stick out the sides of the button or where the button falls apart after being made because the edge of the buttons wasn't crimped tightly). On the other hand, our Model 225 button machine is capable of producing 4 or 5 buttons per minute and buttons made with the Model 225 will not suffer the poor quality issues described above. As you can imagine, faster and better... is better, when making buttons you are going to sell! With a good button machine, like our Model 225, it might take 30 minutes to make 100 professional-quality buttons. The next step in the process then would be to verify each button and make certain you spelled each name correctly, that the correct jersey number appears on each design, and that you produced buttons for everyone who ordered them. Let's add another 15 minutes to do that. Using this example, the amount of time you would likely spend to create 100 personalized sports buttons would be about 2 hours. Now let's divide the $187 profit you earned, by the 2 hours you would likely spend doing the buttons. As you can see, the amount you earn would be $91.00 per hour. For most people, making $93.50 an hour is simply unimaginable. Political Campaign Buttons In my experience, the thing that keeps most people from making political campaign buttons is simply that they lack the ability to create the specialized backgrounds politicians want on their buttons. Things like flags, banners... you know, political-looking stuff. That used to be a problem... and I know, because when I started making buttons back in 1990, that's what kept me from making them. Even thought I desperately wanted to make political campaign buttons, because I knew that there was good money to be made doing them, I was unable to create the backgrounds myself and I couldn't afford to pay a graphic artist $50 an hour to do them for me. Because of that challenge, I didn't start making political campaign buttons until 1999, some 9 years after I began making buttons. And the only reason I was able to do so then was that I had hired a full-time graphic artist. Those challenges led me to the idea of putting political button templates on CDs. In doing so, now anyone who wants to make buttons can do so simply by adding text to any of the backgrounds found on our Button Design CDs. What's possible for you now, that was not possible for me back then, is that for an investment of $79,95, you can purchase one of our Political Button Template CDs and enter the lucrative field of making political campaign buttons, even if you lack graphic design experience. You Won't Believe How Easy it is to Create Campaign Buttons, When You Are Using Our CDs To create a design for a political campaign button, using one of our Political Button Template CDs, simply find the template you'd like to use and open it using a graphics program, or our Online Button Design Studio, add the candidate's name and the office they are seeking with the program's text tool. Once the text is positioned the way you want it, send your design to print. How much easier could it possibly be? Below are a few examples that illustrate just how easy it can be to make great looking political buttons, using any of the templates found on our Political Button Template CDs. (The templates shown below can be found on our Political Button Templates- Series 2 CD) The images in the left column (above) are the templates in their raw state, as you wll find them on our CDs. The images to the right are what your finished buttons might look like after you have added text. Knowing what I know now, I would gladly have paid $500 or more for a product like our Political Button Template CDs. That's because I could have recouped the $500 and started making incredible profits once I started making political campaign buttons. The good news is our Political Button Template CDs don't cost $500! We currently have four different Political Button Templates CDs, Series 1, Series 2, Series 3 and Series 4 and you can purchase them for $79.95 each... or all four for $259.95 If you don't yet own a button machine but are ready to get started, you can receive a copy of any CD we offer, FREE OF CHARGE, when you purchase one of our button-making kits! Why They're So Profitable! The reason that political campaign buttons are more profitable than Sports Booster Buttons is simply that they take less time to create. With Sports Booster Buttons, you must personalize each button and then verify the information on each button. With political campaign buttons, you typically create one design, duplicate it on your computer, print out the necessary number of designs, and then make however many buttons your customer ordered. Let's say you were going to make 100 campaign buttons for a candidate and you were going to charge them $90 for their buttons. (We currently charge $89.95 for 100 2-1/4" political campaign buttons.) Creating a campaign button design, using one of our Political Button Templates CDs, is simply a matter of adding a few words of text (their name and office being sought) and sending it to print. That might take 15 minutes. Once you have finished that task, you still need to produce the buttons and as before, it would take about thirty minutes to make 100 buttons. So the total amount of time necessary to design and make 100 campaign buttons would be about 45 minutes. The cost for the materials to make 100 buttons would be the same as in the previous example, $13.00. Now, to determine the profit you would earn on this order, let's take the $90.00 (if that's what you are charging your client), subtract $13.00 for the button parts and printing, which would leave you a profit of $77.00 But because you only spent 45 minutes completing this order, what you earn from this job would work out to be $102.00 an hour... or nearly $2.00 a minute!! Making Buttons for High School Reunions Making buttons for high school reunions can also be a very profitable venture. Making them is more labor intensive than making other types of buttons, but that's what makes them so profitable. For information on how to make them, click here. What You Need to Get Started If you want to get started making buttons, here's what you will need. Realistically, you are going to need a computer (or at least access to one). When I first started making buttons, I didn't own a computer. I designed and printed the artwork for my buttons at our local community college. To gain access to their computers, I enrolled in a computer class, paid $35.00 tuition for a computer course and not only learned what I needed to know about computers, I also gained access to their computers and printers from 7am until 10 pm. (If you already own a computer, so much the better). Something else you will need is a way to design your buttons. There are dozens of graphics programs on the market, some of which include CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Publisher, PrintShop, PrintArtist, to name a few. The better programs are expensive and time consuming to learn. Or you can now design your buttons online, using our Online Button Design Studio, using nothing more than your Internet browser. For complete details about our Online Button Design Studio, click here. You will also need a means to print the artwork for your buttons. If you have a computer, but don't own a color printer, go ahead and invest in a good one. It's one of the most important investments you will make. These days inkjet printers are very affordable and you can get an outstanding color printer for $100-$150. You are also going to need a button machine with which to make your buttons. If you don't believe another word I say then trust me here. Not all button machines are created equal. Some are easy to use; others are not. Some make professional-quality buttons. Others do not! If you plan to sell the buttons you are going to make, you want a button machine that will make professional-quality buttons. Don't waste your money on an inexpensive button machine that makes buttons that are prone to falling apart, or that leave paper or plastic sticking out the sides. And don't get a button machine that is slow or difficult to operate. The button machines we offer are well-suited for a small business. They're made of solid steel, so they're durable and dependable. Inexpensive machines are typically made of plastic or a plastic-like compound and will not stand up to the rigors of making buttons over a long period of time and will produce buttons that are NOT professional quality. (To see how our Model 225 button machine stacks up against all the 2-1/4" button machines offered by Badge-A-Minit, click here.) The 2-1/4" button is the most popular size. And our Model 225 button machine, which makes 2-1/4" buttons, is our most popular button machine. We market the Model 225 as the "Home-based Business Starter Kit". The "Home-based Business Starter Kit" includes a Model 225 button press, our AC-1 circle cutter (which you use to cut your designs), enough button-making supplies to make 250 pin-back buttons, and three of our Button Design CDs It also includes One Year of Unlimited Access to our Online Button Design Studio. All this for only $319.95! A scanner to scan artwork and photographs is helpful, but you can get by without one if you are short on cash. Color scanners are available for about $100. So if you already have a computer (or access to one) it's truly possible to start a highly profitable, home-based button-making business for less than $500. Making buttons can be lots of fun... and as I've shown, it can also be a very profitable venture! When you have your own button-making business, you can set your own hours, you can work from the comfort of your own home, and you are your own boss. Making buttons truly can be the American dream! If you have any questions about our equipment or button-making in general, feel free to give us a call. Our friendly customer service representatives will be happy to speak with you and answer all your questions. Best wishes! Sincerely, Don Ratliff aka Dr. Don Dr. Don's Buttons 3906 W. Morrow Drive Glendale, Arizona 85308 (800) 243-8293 For even more button-making ideas, click here. Or if you'd like to place an order online, you can access our SECURE ONLINE ORDER PAGE by clicking here. We Gladly Accept Purchase Orders from Schools, Hospitals, and Government Agencies