A Day in the Life of Koolbadges

Calling all Swifties, we have updated the shop with lots of fun, new Taylor Swift inspired badges. So if you are heading to see her this Summer on her massive sell-out Era’s Tour, then you might just want to have a look.

We are so excited that Taylor Swift will be coming to the UK in 2024, and performing her SOLD OUT Era’s tour in Liverpool, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and London. Where are you seeing her? Get your custom Eras Tour Badge on our via our website, they make fun mementoes from the concert.

With our cute, handmade badges, you can let everyone know that you are a Proud Swiftie and want to connect with other Taylor fans! We have lots to pick from and all our badges are proudly handmade by us (Vicki & John) in our small workshop in Cornwall.

So put on your friendship bracelets, cowboy boots and get glam to see Taylor. So many people are meeting up to see the Eras Tour and so many people make new friends at the gigs too. It is such a fun, inclusive and no judgement place to be! To be around other super fans (proud Swifties) and sing your heart out to your favourite Taylor songs is ICONIC! So whether you love getaway car, we are never getting back together or anti-hero, I am sure she will sing so many of her hit singles.

Celebrate World Book Day with some of our colourful and fun, book and reading themed badges.

These World Book Day badges are ideal for libraries & librarians to give out to children & are always super popular with school teachers who hand them out to students during World Book Day. Ideal for English language & literature teachers. We have loads of book badges, bookish badges, reading badges & book nerd badges on the website, so be sure to check them all out.

Our, Ask Me What I am Reading Badges are a fun way to get a conversation started and discover what other people are reading. You can never have too many books on your TBR (to be read) list, and getting recommendations is a nice way to discover books you might never have thought of reading.

We also have reading and library themed badges for students to wear, like our Reading Ambassador and Student Librarian designs. They’re fun, colourful and a lovely way to show that you are helping promote literacy and reading in your school.

Our badges are also a great way to show support for your local library, book club or independent bookshop!

 

 

Over the past 10 years, our school-leaver and teacher badges have become some of our most popular badges. We have expanded our range and ability to customise many of the designs. We have a wide selection of specific subjects, like Science, English, Maths and Philosophy as well as classic, class of 2023 (or the year you’re leaving). Our badges make thoughtful keepsakes for both students and teachers. I have added a fun selection of the designs we offer, be sure to click through to our online koolbadges shop to browse our collection, we have lots of really fun designs. Our teacher customers are some of our favourite & it’s so nice to see so many of you come back each year.
We have a wide selection of Class of badges that can be customised to any year you need. So if you are a teacher and your tutor group or class are graduating or leaver to start secondary school or college, then these make quirky keepsakes. We have rainbow designs, graduate cap, stars, and lots of funky patterns. Your students can wear them to their exams, as a good luck memento, and keep them as a reminder of their time at school.

A new addition to our school-leaver badges are our language designs, we currently have German, French, and Spanish Class of badges, as well as a number of I Love German, French, Spanish designs and also a number of phrases and slogans in these languages too. They’re great for language schools, language teachers and make a sweet keepsake for your year 11 students.

Perfect for language schools, to give to their students as keepsakes. If you need a language that we don’t have a badge for, just email us, and we will be happy to add it to the shop for you.

If you need, I love badges for the subject you teach, we almost certainly have the design you are looking for, if not we have an I Love Badge that you can customise at no extra cost.

We also have fun badges that remind students to work hard & study for their exams, as well as designs for teachers too!

As we all know, June is Pride month, and we have been busy behind the scenes making lots of LGBTQIA+ badges. They’re all so colourful and positive that it makes the Kool Badges workshop feel all positive and happy. We love that so many of our customers wear their rainbow pride badges to help spread awareness and shop support for the LGBTQIA+ community, it makes us so happy.

I thought I would share a few of the pride orders we have had over the past few months, so you can get an idea of the selection of badges we have in the shop. We have tried to be as inclusive as we can with our badges, but we do not know everything and always appreciate you keeping us informed and help us with any terminology we might be a little off with, or badges that might be out of date.

Our pride badges have headed out across the globe this year, from pride events here in the United Kingdom, to pride events across Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia & New Zealand. We love seeing the selections of badges different groups & events order & it’s great to chat to so many of you via social media or email. We are adding new designs to the website all the time, but as things evolve we are sometimes missing certain sexualities, genders, pronouns, or designations.

Furthermore, we’ve also sold a lot of rubber/leather/latex pride badges, pony play badges, puppy play badges. If you would like us to add a flag or symbol for your particular fetish, please get in touch with the details & we will gladly add it for you.

I’n the meantime, we will get back to the workshop to finish all of your orders & hopefully we will see some of you on our travels this summer.

Vicki & John

Support Trans Rights Badges

Straight Against Hate Badges

Intersex Progress Pride Flag Badges

LGBTQIA+ ALLY Badges

Respect My Pronoun Badges

Rainbow Pride Slogan Badges

With Father’s Day fast approaching & we thought it was the perfect time to let you all know that we have updated the Koolbadges shop with lots of new Father’s Day Badges! We think our handmade badges are a great way to show your Dad just how much you love him. Our badges are 25mm in size and handmade in our UK workshop

Our Father’s Day themed badges make lovely handmade gifts for all Dads. You can attach them to your Father’s Day card or give them as gifts, so your Dad can wear them all day long. We have a great selection of designs including lots of fun dad-themed slogans like Dads Rock, I Love My Dad and Best Dad In The Galaxy (which are some of our best-selling designs). As well as many classic Happy Father’s Day options too! Our designs are bright, cool and make fun, alternative and affordable gifts. With so many designs, we are confident we have the perfect badge for your Dad!

So pop over to our online shop & have a browse through our Father’s Day designs.

We are super proud that we’ve been making your badges for over 10 years now & we are very proud of the handmade nature of our badges. Each one is hand cut & pressed in a manual badge machine (this takes serious time & coffee). Our badge machine is British made and all of our badge parts are purchased from the same UK supplier who manufactures them in house (we have been using our supplier for almost 8 years now). We love keeping everything nice & local, It keeps down fuel miles & helps other small businesses in our local economy. Everything from our printing company to our stationery suppliers is UK based. This means our badges might not be as cheap as imports, but they are very ethical & made with Uber amounts of love. We know the importance of supporting smaller retailers (we are one ourselves) each sale makes a difference, it really does.

We are a small husband & wife team, but we value each & every one of our customers and know so many of our regulars by name. Thank you for your continued support, we love making your badges!

We wanted to write a quick post about our custom badge service. We have always offered custom badges alongside our own designs & these are becoming increasingly popular with all of our customers. We make hundreds of custom designed badges each week & some of the designs you guys send to us are absolutely amazing.

Ordering custom badges from us is really simple, if you have a design as a jpeg you can upload it directly to our custom badge page on the website. You can then select a quantity and checkout right away on the website. We will then take your design & use it to create your very own 25mm custom-made badges.

We also have a Photoshop template in psd format. You can use this if you have design experience & it allows you a little more control over design placement, bleed and quality. You can then save your psd file with all layers intact & upload it to the website. Kool badges then take your customised badge design and use it to create your very own customised badges.

If both of those methods seem a bit daunting, or if you don’t feel confident designing your badge yourself, you can always get in touch with us with your requirements and we can design something on your behalf.

If you upload your own design to the website, we will not list them publicly on the website. Your design is yours to do with as you please. Many people order custom badges for their business, for a club or group they belong to or for charity purposes. They are also great for goody bags. Many customers even resell their badges with a good margin to make a few pounds.

We make hundreds of custom designed badges every week so we are used to dealing with all sorts of designs. You will also find that the more badges you order of your own design, the cheaper they get, which is ideal for larger runs of custom badges.

As always, your badges will be lovingly hand-made in our Cornish workshop, and as we are still a small family business each order will be given that extra care & attention our customers have come to know & love. If you have ordered custom badges from us, we are always happy to see your photos of them in use. We receive a lot of tweets including photos of your badges & we are always happy to see them out in the real world.

So if you would like to create your own custom badges, head on over to our badge design page & get started. Any problems, just drop us an email or a tweet and we can help you out.

Now, go make badges!

The Kool Badges Workshop.

A selection of recent custom badge orders.

Well Easter seems to come round quicker every year, not that we’re complaining as we love to eat all the yummy Easter chocolate (especially those Lindt bunnies). So many of you return each year to buy your Easter badges from us & we thank you for your continued support. We hand make all our badges from our Cornish workshop & are always grateful when we see returning customers.

This year we have added quite a few new Easter Badge designs to the shop, and they’re already proving to be quite popular. There are lots of Eggs, Bunnies and cute Spring themed badges, and they make cute alternative handmade gifts to chocolate. They’re also great to hide in Easter Egg Hunts & for Party Bags.

Easter Badges are also really popular with schools, many teachers choosing to give them out to their students. They can be pinned to school uniforms and blazers & even onto the work clothes of our older badge lovers. If you want badges for Easter be sure to place your order soon. The Kool Badges workshop gets really busy in March, so if you are able to order in plenty of time, it really does help us out.

Finally, I’d like to highlight the hand made nature of our badges. Each one is hand cut & pressed in a manual badge machine. Our badge machine is British and all of our badge parts are purchased from the same UK supplier who manufacture them in house. We love keeping everything nice & local. It keeps down fuel miles & helps other small businesses in our local economy. Everything from our printing company to our stationery suppliers are UK based. This means our badges might not be as cheap as imports, but they are very ethical & made with Uber amounts of love. Support home-grown businesses. We are a small husband & wife team, but we value each & every one of our customers, and know so many of our regulars by name.

Thank you for your continued support, we love making your badges!

We have been making badges for almost 10 years now and over that time we have made lots of badges from custom logo’s to St Patrick’s Day Badges, but some of our absolute favourites to make are Wedding Badges. In some small, handmade way, It makes us feel like we’re a small part of your big day.

Our Wedding badge section has almost 400 designs (we add new designs almost weekly), many of our wedding themed badges can be customised with names, dates and even locations, so the badges can be made quite personal & unique to your big day.

Our customers have used our badges as little mementos of their special day or to identify their guests as Team Bride or Groom, or as inexpensive handmade tokens for each guest. Our Hen / Stag Party Badges are also popular and can be quite fun and a little cheeky at times.

Our badges are all handmade to order from our small workshop in Cornwall where the kettle is always on and the biscuit tin full of tasty treats! We’d love to be part of your special day, so if you’re thinking about having badges, make sure you pop over to our shop and have a look at our Wedding Badge selection.