Finding a Product That People Will Buy

This, of course, might be my fatal flaw.

The product I’m creating is a competition to the humble Enamel Pin, but better.  Our products are different but in a good way. 

They are full color (with minimal limitations on color), scalable from single badge to 1000 badges.  The image to the right is a series resulting from a collaboration with a designer, Alyssa Harris, a young designer from Idaho.  As you can see, they are full colors, random shapes and can look pretty damn cool.  Due to the manufacturing method I’m using, and the back end code that I use for generating the badges, I can scale pretty easily based on fairly simple input.

The closest analogy to this product is the enamel pin.  These are lapel pins that are carved/stamped out of metal and then painted to give the color.  These have been slowly gaining popularity for a year or two. There is a large number of the pins on Aliexpress, and so within the Pin community there is a hell of a lot of Rick and Morty pins going around.  These are exactly the same pins.  Emojis are also extremely popular due to the familiarity and generally free artwork.   There is a growing number of kickstarter campaigns where people crowdsource funds – sometimes thousands of dollars to get the first batch done.  Now there are also a lot of absolutely amazing designers and pin collaborators out there.

Soft enamel pins seem to have stabilized at around $9-12 retail.  So that would tell me that somewhere in the $7-10 range would be reasonable – if the financial side maps up.

So how is Badgly different.

1. These don’t need to only be pins.  Since they are an unfinished blank when we receive them I’ve settled on pin backs for pins, or magnets.  This allows the same design to be used for Lapel Pins on leather jackets, pinboard pins, hat pins.  The magnet form can be for fridge magnets, cubicle magnets or lockers.  So I’ve got a fairly broad set of applicable options.  On Badgly, the purchase options for all designs is either magnet or pin.  I currently don’t differentiate on price since either one comes down to a few cents.
2. There is no metal, the badges are made out of sandstone, so they are considerably lighter.  A design for a typical enamel pin will usually have the walls in the design, where the metal prevents colors from mixing.  For the Badgly pins there is no wall, you can have colors right alongside each other without needing any separator.
3. Since we don’t have a die to cut, a single badge is effectively no more expensive than 100 badges.  For custom designs, this makes the difference between a $15 purchase and a $150 baseline purchase.
4. Designs are easy.  In the simplest form, it’s an image to simple 2D badge.
5. 3D. Badgly pins can be 3D, in the simplest form each individual color can be raised or lowered to different heights – providing a very unique experience.
6. Contoured 3D.  Beyond the straight 2D extrusion, Badgly pins can have any 3D contours you’d like. This is similar to 3D cast pins.  3D cast pins have an entry cost for about $200.

Head over to https://badgly.com/ and tell me what you think.