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Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.
Yet again I've dragged out some little ad from a 1977 Popular Science; I just can't help myself. This one is especially good:
So, here we have President Malcom J. Roebuck telling me, with a look of dead-eyed seriousness, that I can make $25 to $100 per hour by making and selling "metal pin-back badges" made with his $35 button crimper doohickey. Let's use his own figures here and break down exactly what it would take in the "profitable badge and button business" to make this $25 to $100/hour.
So, to even hit his low end, I need to sell 10 of these an hour, every hour. That's assuming I'm only selling the expensive "photo" buttons and have zero expenses-- say, I stole the machine and am just punching images from discarded newspapers and ATM receipts. Roebuck, please. I can't even imagine the convoluted chain of events that would have to happen for you to hit the $100/hour number, but I bet it would involve a stadium full of people, and you and your button-making machine being the only source for an antidote for something.
So, $100/hr in 1977 dollars, selling cheap-ass pins you make on the crappy little crimper you bought from this crook. I'd really love to see the "fully illustrated money making plans" he offers as well. I bet they have tips like "Make sure everyone you know buys several buttons, every day, forever! It's THAT EASY!"
Yet again I've dragged out some little ad from a 1977 Popular Science; I just can't help myself. This one is especially good:
So, here we have President Malcom J. Roebuck telling me, with a look of dead-eyed seriousness, that I can make $25 to $100 per hour by making and selling "metal pin-back badges" made with his $35 button crimper doohickey. Let's use his own figures here and break down exactly what it would take in the "profitable badge and button business" to make this $25 to $100/hour.
So, to even hit his low end, I need to sell 10 of these an hour, every hour. That's assuming I'm only selling the expensive "photo" buttons and have zero expenses-- say, I stole the machine and am just punching images from discarded newspapers and ATM receipts. Roebuck, please. I can't even imagine the convoluted chain of events that would have to happen for you to hit the $100/hour number, but I bet it would involve a stadium full of people, and you and your button-making machine being the only source for an antidote for something.
So, $100/hr in 1977 dollars, selling cheap-ass pins you make on the crappy little crimper you bought from this crook. I'd really love to see the "fully illustrated money making plans" he offers as well. I bet they have tips like "Make sure everyone you know buys several buttons, every day, forever! It's THAT EASY!"
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Only the 1" diameter ones are cool. If you sold bigger ones, no wonder your business flopped.
:D
In 1977 everyone I knew had a jacket covered in those buttons with logos for some band or other. At the end of the day, no matter how spiky your hair, you could take your jacket off and jump in the shower.
Today the band logos are tattooed on, and the pins piece faces, not jackets. Yes, there were some people in the 70's with safety pin face piercings, but for the most part things seemed so much more reversible then.
A little harsh. Had one of these in high school. Most I made was about $400 during city basketball tournament. Maybe $25/hr making and selling. Serious dough in mid 70's. Company is still there. They never offered a 1 inch machine as far as I know. Would have moved me from pep rallys to head shop market.
Badge-A-Minits are still around but they're junk that're only suited to the summercamp arts and crafts scene. I have a good steel one (1" of course, JFrancis) and make a little extra cash selling them to bands for their merch tables, but c'mon, it takes me over an hour to make a hundred and I sell them at the standardish rate of $25/100. There's next to no market for individual sales of these things unless you're a reasonably talented and prolific sloganeer or cartoonist or something. I kind of love that ad!
The junior high school and high school I went to made significant amounts of money for the music program by selling Badge-A-Minit buttons for $1 each. Students donated magazine photos for buttons; the Band Parents (it was an association) would also make you a button out of pretty much anything you wanted. So -- around 1990, at least, this was still an effective fund-raiser in the right situation, but absolutely NOT for individuals with the possssssssssssssible exception of street vendors, who would probably have a better-quality press or a wholesaler, to begin with.
You know, Mr Roebucks head is the perfect shape to be on one of those buttons.
How about a litle respect for Mr. Roebucks, a legit geer and inventor.
Title:
Die-set combination for making pin-back badges
United States Patent 4299019
Abstract:
The present invention concerns a combination of mutually interfitting die and press-block elements adapted for manual use and operation with each other to produce a finished and permanent assembly of the separate components of a pin-back button or badge.
Inventors: Roebuck, Malcolm J. (LaSalle, IL)
Malcom seems to still exist
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3VY9KU5PFS7RF
http://malcolmgroup.com/
I guess you never went to a science fiction con in the seventies or eighties. You could always count on seeing the one guy in the dealer's room with two or three tables full of buttons with clever sayings. Probably about one-third to half the people in the dealer's room would have some amount of buttons made with a Badge-A-Minit.
And yeah, they sold. I saw the one guy whose sole dealer's room presence was the huge variety of textual buttons at every con I went to when I was growing up; clearly he was making enough money to pay for his trip to the con, and then some. I don't think it was his day job, but as hobbies go it was turning a pretty tidy profit.
OMG they still exist!
http://www.badgeaminit.com/
Minor Anachronism: ATMs were unknown in 1977.
http://www.nancybuttons.com
Oh, lookit this, you can get anti-nancy buttons too.
http://www.zazzle.com/anti-nancy+buttons
No commercial connection, here, although I dated one of her friends in high school. :)
he's still at it too..
http://www.malcolmgroup.com/
Am I the only one who really wants to buy one???
Egypt Urnash beat me to it, but yeah, you could move a ton of buttons at a convention (now it's badges and patches, but same idea.)
I remember these, you couldn't actually make money from them (or not much) unless you had a "captive population" to sell to (what are you gonna do, go door to door selling pins?)-- someone in my high school sold them and I actually did buy one. Even at a flea market, carnival or convention I can't see making $100 per hour (that would have to be about a pin a minute at $2 each).
The REAL scam back then was "stuffing envelope" scams, which were actually like Ponzi schemes: you paid some guy to send you the envelopes and the brochures, and then you stuffed them and sent them to other suckers to convince them to start their own envelope stuffing "business."
My grandfather was an entrepreneur, and among other businesses and his political career, owned a printing company which offered these buttons as one of their products. He made lots of them for his political cronies and for the local branches of the parties. I think I still have a Reagan one somewhere that he showed me how to make when I visited the print shop as a child. I don't know how much he made per hour on them, but he certainly had more than paid for the equipment many times over.
Jason, don't he a hater. The reason you have a shed full of crap instead of a shop full of gear is that you can't see. Yeah, you could have cashed in making and selling buttons. You could make photo buttons using the customers own photo. You could use stock photos or your own duplicates for a few cents (1970's price) each. You could use hand made graphics (Flower Power, Disco, etc) essentially for free. You could make a deal with clubs or bands or church groups and a very small cut - or even not have to kick back anything. Good jobs were paying $7 - 8 dollars an hour then and you still had to pay taxes. This was a cash gig. Don't dis makers.
When I was a boy scout (3+ decades ago), I bought one of these, and made back the cost of it a few times over.
The real dollars poured in when I was in college. I would make singletons for people out of photographs, and I got a few contracts to produce badges for conventions.
It is still sitting in my basement... Hmmmm, maybe I should take it out.......
I think that it might be possible to sell $100 of buttons in an hour--for just one hour--under perfectly ideal circumstances: say, at the beginning of a convention, with ideal placement in the exhibitor/vendor hall, while people still have plenty of cash in their pockets, with a popular subject/saying/theme and a good design.
And, of course, that's what the guy selling these things is going to tout as the top moneymaking rate, just as any and everyone else selling a moneymaking scheme does. They're not going to tell you that your odds of making money off these things will fall to slim to nil after the market is saturated with them, or that you have to come up with something catchier than a catchphrase well past its sell-by date printed on Astrobright stock, or that using that sort of hand-press device will get you started on a nice case of tendonitis and/or carpal tunnel syndrome. Malcolm J. Roebuck didn't become president of whatever or get that sweet herringbone tweed sport coat by holding your hand.
I bought one of these about 15 years ago when I worked at TGI Fridays so I could make my own flair - and sold pins to others - $1 ea., 6 for $5 - the machine paid for itself and was fun but it was no get rich quick plan!! I still have it, if anyone needs a button :)
#3
Yep. The ex and I had an alright business (she still does it) making 1" buttons for bands and whatever. Get a button machine and a netflix account and it's not a terrible way to make some spare scratch.
Snake oil salesman or not, Badge-A-Minits sold by the shitload. I worked for Kinko's many years ago, and a regional manager came up with the great idea of having his stores trying to sell large badges produced with a Roebuck's product. Of course, it was a monumental failure as the dies never worked, the plastic disks were too small to adequately fold and crimp under the face plate, etc... We ended up with a box full of misprints that eventually went out with the trash.
I knew a guy who was glued to one of these at university in the 70s. He never made huge amounts of money, but he met lots of people (A surprising number of girls were impressed by a special button made just for them). He also persuaded various campus groups to buy in bulk, probably hitting the $100/hour rate once or twice.
I got one of those for my birthday around 1979, and a few years later I did in fact make a little money selling campaign buttons to candidates for college student body offices. It probably was around $25/hour for an hour or two.
I still have it and still use it occasionally.
Not only do I live in LaSalle, IL, own one of this man's fine products, and have been inside the plant where Badge-A-Minit used to be produced, in my child-hood I actually met the man, the myth, the legend. I barely remember him and obviously I wasn't that interested being 6-7 years old at the time and him being just some old man.
You'd think a pro-craft site like BoingBoing would give a little more love to the badge & button makers of the world. Any aspiring artist thumbing through Gavin Lucas' "Badge Button Pin" art book will understand all the possibilities.
Personally, I own a Tecre Model 100 button machine, which is far superior to any current Badge-A-Minit product.
Hey, Michael Jackson designs for Badge-A-Minit! The meme is complete.
http://www.badgeaminit.com/michaeljackson.html
I made and sold them with photocopies of my original punk rock photos and some press kit photos I got from a few record companies. My best pal Mark A Martinez and I colored them in with markers, made them, and sold at a few punk shows.
It was harder than hell to make them, very primitive machinery. Mine was 2 inches and don't think they offered a smaller button. I still have a bag of finished buttons.
I was stunned to find a neg I took of Pat Smear, of the Germs and Nirvana, wearing my button with my photo of Debbie Harry/Blondie, onstage at the Whisky, fall 1977.
But IF I could have made smaller ones, and IF the machine were easier to use (hey, I have art degrees and am very good with my fingers, but that apparatus was imprecise to say the least), then maybe it would have been worthwhile.
I kept telling Mark he was really creative. No one ever told him that as often as I. He later became a graphic artist.
The best part was when he and I worked on my solo photo book, PUNK PIONEERS. Would never have happened if not for spotting his talent making those buttons.
Can't see the scam here. The proposed profits might be a bit on the optimistic side, but I remember that in the late 70's and early 80's, you were basically naked if your coat and/or your bag weren't covered in these pins. No flea market or festival or rock/punk concert where not quite some folks were selling the buttons, which lets me conclude it was worth their while. I knew at least half a dozen spaced-out hippies who were making a living with these (and/or screen printed stickers). One guy I knew made enough with these to be able to open a quite fancy bookstore with the profits.
They have come back in fashion lately here (in Germany), and sell for 1-2 Euros a piece. Do the math yourself, this is a legitimate business.
So yes, don't diss this guy please, what he had to propose was an honest opportunity - for a rather small investment you could earn about as much as a factory worker or a nurse in about the same amount of time, if you were a bit more creative in your designs even more.
Anyway, people generally underestimate the profits you can achieve selling these penny items.
Anonymous @12, that's Nancy Lebovitz.
But she's not the only one. I'm pretty sure I saw at least two or three button dealers at the last Worldcon I went to.
The numbers may be on the ambitious side but not impossible. In fact I had one of those machines in 1979 and supported myself very nicely for a whole summer while traveling around. I had a Polaroid camera and went to flea markets selling photo buttons with pictures of people's kids, dogs, girlfriends, and Grandmas. The best business was when I could get next to somebody selling doll/baby clothes. At the end of summer I went to a week long concert, actually a church gathering, and sold so many buttons that I was giving money away to some of the missionaries.
Badg-A-Minit is a legitimate business. Like any business, the most important factor is whether you can sell your stuff.
Maybe you can't, but my friend manages fine. He gets big orders for people wanting them for events etc. Of course, with a cynical attitude, you're not likely to get very far doing this.
All the stuff about buttons, and how much you can maker per hour is very interesting. But what I want to know is, what's the deal with Malcom's hair in that picture? His head is kind of oblong, but his hair is perfectly round in the back.
Its been Photoshopped, I can tell by the pix... oh wait, 1977... they didn't have Photoshop back then. :)
I haven't been allowed to use a Badge-A-Minit ever since that incident in 4th grade.
We borrowed a machine and made 4000 Badge-A-Minit buttons in two weeks for the campaign last October. The hard part was cutting the circle artwork, but I made a little jig to speed it up and save my fingers. My tags for the YouTube are "campaign buttons Badge-A-Minit circle." The buttons were actually pretty nice.
I can't wait to read about "Professor Snodgrasses Native Indian Curall" and the ineffectiveness of x-Ray specs. No wonder I never found The Onion funny.