Custom pin badges can be made from various material, like copper, brass, bronze, iron, zinc alloy, aluminum, stainless steel, stainless steel iron, pewter, sterling silver, ABS, soft PVC, silicone and more. Besides material, there are also kinds of processes to finish the pin. Are you confused about how to choose the base material to create your own design pins? We usually make suggestion for customers on the basis of their designs as well as budget. Here are some tips for you.

Compared to metal pin & plastic pin badges, metal is much durable and not easy to be damaged, therefore metal pin is the most popular style and widely used. Among all the metal materials, sterling silver is the most expensive one, some companies would like to choose #925 silver to recognize or reward the employees who served for decades and have significant performance.

The second expensive is copper hard enamel pin, which are widely used for military badges, car badges, costly jewelry etc. For the mineral colors are burned under 850 degree, it’s said that the cloisonné color can be preserved for 100 years without color fading.

The less expensive option to copper material is brass, bronze. Raw bronze material is less yellow than brass, price of bronze is a bit cheaper than brass as well, while the final pin finishes are almost same. Therefore, unless the military has special requirement on the metal element, or our factory prefer finish the pin in bronze. The maximum size of bronze badge is 140mm and the max. thickness is 5mm.

Iron soft enamel badge is very popular nowadays because of its cheap price as well as similarity finish as bronze. Many people have difficulty to distinguish the raw material between bronze & iron pin, unless use a magnet. The maximum thickness we can do for iron material is 3mm and 3” size, as iron is the hardest one among all the metals and have more impurities in it. Just because of this, sometimes we use zinc alloy pins as substitution for those pins in large size, with vivid motif effect or pieced holes. Not like the stamping processing, it’s injection mold for zinc alloy, so there is without extra cut out die charge, it’s cost effective than iron pin. Our factory can do zinc alloy pin badges with weight less than 1kgs. Aluminum, stainless steel iron are usually used to make printing pins like CMYK printing or no plating required. Aluminum is the lightest metal and cheaper than stainless iron.

Should you still have any questions, please simply send your custom design to sales@sjjgifts.com to know more. Production artwork and pin prices with full detailed description shall be submitted to your approval. Pretty Shiny Gifts has 2 metal factories located in Dongguan, Guangdong & Jiangxi province. With more than 40 years experiences in the OEM industry, you can trust our high-quality products & efficiency service will surpass others. Look forward to hearing from you.