Custom Trading Pins: Small Pins Convey Great Meaning
Custom Trading Pins: Small Pins Convey Great Meaning
Custom trading pins are a sports tradition with a long, distinguished history. From the Olympics to youth sports, they have become icons for the young and the old. Deemed "the Number One Spectator Sport of the Olympic Games," custom trading pins help bring people together in fellowship worldwide.
Custom trading pins are a vast part of youth sports, and nowhere more so than in youth baseball. Thousands of Little League players swap custom trading pins by the millions each year. By the time the Little League World Series rolls around every August, trading pin frenzy grips the home city, South Williamsport, Pa.
The craze for custom trading pins in Little League has really taken off over the past three decades. The Little League Baseball organization introduced its first official custom trading pins in the early 1980s, and the trend kicked into high gear. Since then, it has grown every year.
The roots of today's custom trading pins date back more than a century to the first modern Olympic Games held in 1896. At that event, athletes and officials wore pins to identify themselves. A decade later, Swedish athletes introduced the forerunner of custom trading pins as we know them today, in their national colors of blue and yellow.
Before long, athletes were swapping custom trading pins among themselves as symbols of friendship. The pins' unique affiliation with the Games and distinctive artwork made them attractive keepsakes, while their small size made custom trading pins easy to trade.
Since spectators discovered the fun of custom trading pins in 1980, the popularity of trading pins at the Olympic Games has grown ever bigger. According to one news magazine, more than 3 million pins were traded at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Custom trading pins took on political meaning at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. Many Chinese traders rejected the official Chinese pins, choosing to collect custom trading pins from American and Taiwanese delegations instead.
As the popularity of custom trading pins has increased, corporations such as Coca-Cola have gotten involved in pin trading as well. In 1988, Coke created its first Official Olympic Pin Trading Center for the Winter Olympics in Calgary. The pin center drew more than 17,000 visitors a day, the company noted on its website.
Four years later, the response was even greater. In Barcelona in 1992, more than half a million people, representing 70 countries, trekked through Coke's center for custom trading pins. Coke's celebrated the trading pin center on its website, where the company declared custom trading pins "cultural currency sparking trades, creating personal connections and breaking down barriers among people of different backgrounds, languages and customs."
Whether trading Olympic pins or baseball custom trading pins, the going rate for pins starts at one-for-one. But the more rare or unique a pin is, the greater the "exchange rate" it trades for. Some especially valued custom trading pins can even command a premium of 10 lesser pins.
The popularity of custom trading pins continues to grow in many respects. Last year's Commonwealth Games in India were an example, with spectators scrambling for pins toward the end of the Games. Custom trading pins are likely to remain popular keepsake items for the foreseeable future.
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