Custom Die-Cut Stickers for Babylon, New York

West Islip sits 1.6 miles from Babylon, Lindenhurst 2.6 miles off in the other direction, and North Lindenhurst a little beyond that at 3.1 miles, which is close enough that a community group meeting in any one of them tends to have members living in the other three. We cover the whole of that cluster from a single shop at 205 East Main Street in Huntington, New York, where the printing and the cutting both happen. This page is written for the person in such a group who has been handed the job of ordering the badges and the giveaway stickers: the one holding a logo file, a rough headcount and a budget that somebody else set.

Orders that travel by street address

We hold no ZIP code for Babylon in our records. That sounds like a problem and it is not, but it does change one small thing about how you fill in the checkout. Instead of leaning on the postal code to place the order, we key everything to the street line: number, street name, and the unit, suite or floor if there is one. If the delivery is going to a hall, a clubhouse or a member's home rather than a business, put a recipient name on the order as well, because that name is what gets the box into the right hands once it arrives. Suffolk County addresses in this part of the shoreline can look similar to one another across adjacent places, so a complete street line matters more here than it does in most of what we handle. If anything on the address looks ambiguous when we read it back, we write to you before the job goes onto the press rather than guessing.

What two hundred badges come to

Die-cut stickers are priced by the square inch, and the per inch rate falls as the count goes up. The bands are 35 cents from 1 to 24 pieces, 30 cents from 25 to 49, 28 cents from 50 to 99, 26 cents from 100 to 249, 24 cents from 250 to 499, and 22 cents at 500.

Take the size a lot of event badges land on: 1.75 by 2.75 inches, which is 4.8125 square inches. At 200 pieces you are in the 26 cent band, so each one is $1.25 and the run of 200 comes to $250.25. Push the same design to 250 pieces and the rate drops to 24 cents, which makes each sticker $1.16 and the run of 250 $288.75. You get fifty more badges for $38.50, which is the kind of arithmetic worth doing before you settle on a number, because the extras cover the people who turn up unlisted and the ones who lose the first badge. Note that the price is driven by area, not by how complicated the outline is, so a shaped badge and a rectangle of the same square inches cost the same.

Where the ten piece minimum sits

An order qualifies at 10 or more pieces, or at $10 of merchandise, whichever it reaches first. That is a qualifying threshold rather than a price floor, so it does not add anything to a larger order and it does not round a small one up. A committee ordering a handful of officer badges alongside a bigger run of general stickers will clear it on the combined total without thinking about it. A single test piece at a large size can clear it on value alone.

Getting the artwork into a shape we can cut

A die-cut sticker needs two things from your file: the artwork itself, and a sense of where the blade should travel around it. If your group logo already has a clean outline, we can follow it. If it is a badge with a name field, a date line or a role printed underneath, tell us which elements change from piece to piece, because a run where every badge carries a different name is set up differently from a run of two hundred identical ones. Keep anything you do not want trimmed away back from the edge of the shape. Thin tails, single letter serifs and long thin banners are the parts that give a cut line trouble, and we will usually suggest rounding those into the body of the design rather than chasing them with the blade. Send the highest resolution version you have rather than one lifted off a website, and if all you have is the website version, say so and we will tell you what it can be printed at.

Four people who usually send us the file

The volunteer coordinator is generally the one placing the order, and what she wants is one batch that covers everybody on the roster plus a margin. She is the person the quantity bands are really aimed at, since the step from one band to the next often costs less than she expects.

The treasurer wants a figure to put in front of a board. The worked example above is there for exactly that: a size, a count, a per piece price and a total, with no separate setup line to explain away afterwards.

The person running the welcome table wants badges that are readable at arm's length and easy to hand out at the door. That usually means fewer words on the sticker, larger type, and a shape with enough white space that a name written on by hand still reads.

The member who designed the logo in the first place wants it to come out looking like the thing on the letterhead. Send the original file if you can find it, and flag any colour that has to match something the group already prints.

Questions from organisers

Can I collect a Babylon order from the shop instead of having it sent? Yes. Local pickup from the Huntington storefront is free, and it is a straight line of 13.4 miles due south from us to you. Choose pickup at checkout, put the name of whoever is coming for it on the order, and we will hold it at the counter under that name.

How do I fill in the address for a Babylon delivery when there is no ZIP on file? Give the full street line and a recipient name and leave the rest to us. The order is keyed to that street line, and a unit, suite or floor number is worth adding whenever one exists.

What would 200 badges at 1.75 by 2.75 inches cost for a Babylon event? That size is 4.8125 square inches, 200 pieces falls in the 26 cent band, so each badge is $1.25 and the run is $250.25.

Should our Babylon group order 250 instead of 200 to catch the next price band? At 250 the rate moves to 24 cents, which puts each badge at $1.16 and the run at $288.75. That is $38.50 for fifty more pieces, so if you expect any walk ups at all it is usually the better buy.

Our members come from West Islip and Lindenhurst as well as Babylon, can we put one order in for all of them? Yes, and it is simpler that way. One combined count lands in a lower per inch band than several small ones would, and the whole batch ships or gets collected as a single order that you split up at your end.