No event is complete without some cool custom swag, so during the planning stages of the 2010 event we sat down to discuss what kind of commemorative token we could hand out to all the participants. Personally I was all about the custom t-shirt, but they can be both expensive and hard to manage because people come in all shapes and sizes and genders. Then someone had a great idea: What about some cool buttons? The idea stuck and soon we were on the lookout for someone who could turn out a couple of hundred buttons for us within our extremely limited budget. Not an easy task. At least until…

Six Cent Press Presses Play

We’d heard good things about this local Vancouver company called Six Cent Press so we decided to send them an email and see if they wanted to play with us. And boy did they ever. Not only were they willing to take on our crazy button ideas, but they were doing it for free! We would provide the designs and they would run four hundred buttons in two different styles for all of our participants and others interested. And all the buttons would be mounted on custom cards, making them a collectors’ item. Very cool.

We got to work and soon had two different button designs: The 12×12 logo you see above and a secret custom button that will be unveiled at the event on September 12th, 2010.  The designs were packaged and sent through the ether to Levi and his team, and a few short days later we got a call that the buttons were ready to go.

Levi from Six Cent Press

Meet Levi – The Button Master

Entering the doors of Six Cent Press on the east side of Vancouver we were met by Levi Doerntlein – artist and button maker extraordinaire. He told us Six Cent Press started off as a side project while he was working as an artist and quickly grew to a big production facility. Their main clientele these days is big businesses looking for a cheap and easy way of doing branding and they now turn out millions of custom pin back buttons each year. And because business is booming and they are such cool people, they take on not-for-profit projects like ours just for fun.

Buttons for One and All

Thanks to Levi and Six Cent Press we have a box full of buttons itching to get pinned on camera bags, jackets and whatever else you would pin a pin onto. Each of our 60 marathoners will get one of each of the custom buttons to wear so when you stroll through downtown Vancouver Sunday September 12th and you see someone clutching a camera and wearing a 12×12 pin, you know what they are doing.