A Day in the Life of Koolbadges

Small Business Saturday 2015 – Kool Badges

It’s the 7th December 2015, it’s a Saturday & all around the UK today it’s Small Business Saturday. The hope is that today, you will choose to shop with small businesses and support them in the run up to Christmas. So today, buy your coffee from an independent coffee shop, buy your lunch from a local bakery, deli or restaurant & buy your hand made presents & stocking fillers from Kool Badges Christmas Badges.

It gets harder & harder for small business to compete with large companies. We don’t have the money to float us through quiet periods like huge companies & we don’t have unlimited advertising budgets to take out glossy magazine adverts & TV spots.

The same applies online. eBay, Not on the High Street & Amazon all pay a fortune to put their products above ours & other small business using paid adwords ads. We,?Ǭ†the manufacturer & retailer of our own products just can’t compete with paid advertising meaning many small business have to stop selling via their own website and sell via these huge sales platform, where the big retailer gets their cut. So today, support all small businesses when you buy something. It really does help us to keep the lights on over here at Kool Badges HQ.

We have a great range of Christmas badges, all hand made in our workshop & only available for sale through our website and a select few small retailers nationwide. We don’t sell our badges anywhere else, so please visit the website & place an order. Our badges are often copied all over the internet, but buying directly from us allows us to keep designing & making Kool Badges.

Buying from small businesses may not be as cheap as using a massive retailer, but all of the money we make is reinvested in the business & spent in the local economy. We don’t have our money hidden in the Cayman Islands avoiding tax. We pay everything we should, meaning sometimes we can’t compete on price with big retailers, but our customer service is always better & you can be sure our badges have been made by hand, with love, in the UK using locally sourced components and materials. We don’t outsource our manufacturing to China to save on costs. This means we always offer you the best price we can whilst making sure we can still afford to manufacture our badges in the UK. It’s the same for all Small businesses so keep that in mind when items are a little more expensive from Small Business, compared to the likes of Amazon.

So head over to the website & grab some hand made badges. Please pass our link on to friends & family & support small business on Small Business Saturday. You can even get an extra 15% off with code XMAS2015 when spending more than ?Ǭ£7 on anything but custom badges.

We are heading into town, walking right past Starbucks and into our local independent coffee shop when staying in Dundee, The Burgh.

Please do spread the word today, it really does help.

I don’t know about you, but we are starting to feel very festive here at Koolbadges – our Christmas Jumpers are out, and we have been listening to Smooth Christmas. Lots of you have already ordered your Christmas Badges, so very organised! If you haven’t seen our festive selection then you are missing out, we have over 400 Christmas themed badges & Badges Packs which are perfect for Christmas parties, Stocking fillers, Secret Santa’s and just generally spreading a little festive spirit (unless you buy our Anti Christmas Badges).

As most of you know, all our badges are handmade by us (husband & wife) in our Cornish workshop. So make sure you support handmade businesses this year.

Now excuse me while I go heat up some mince pies & pop another pan of mulled wine on the stove. The workshop is all cosy & warm, and we are busy making all of your orders, by hand on our workbench. So keep us busy & go grab some Xmas Badges.

Every year we support Movember here in the Kool Badges workshop. Whether that consists of Mr Koolbadges growing a massive 70s moustache or sponsoring all of our friends & family who become Mo-Bros for November, we really do try to get involved in this wonderful charity.

We donated a ton of our badges for them to give out & sell to friends to help their fundraising efforts. Some are even being auctioned off, it’s all great fun. We have loads of different moustache badges for you to choose from. They are perfect for fund-raising & great for the females in your life who perhaps can’t (or don’t fancy) growing a moustache 🙂

We have a great range of Moustache / tash badges, from our ever popular blue & black moustache badge to our red & black moustache badges, but our most popular seem to be our awesome set of movember badges. You really do need to go & checkout our range.

Best of luck with all of your fundraising efforts & remember, for every tash badge you buy in November, we will donate to one of our Mo-Bros. Remember, we have so many colourful and funky themed MO / moustache badges to pick from.

 

Halloween badges are some of our most popular products here at koolbadges. Every year we seem to make more & more Halloween badges for our regular customers. Many people don’t even think of badges when it comes to Halloween costume planning, but they are great to pin to school uniforms & work clothes. It is much easier to wear a badge on your shirt than to sit at your desk dressed as a ghost or zombie!

Halloween badges also make great trick or treat gifts. Hand them out to the children who knock at your door along with sweets & chocolate as an extra special treat.

The workshop is working day & night to get out your badge orders & we sent out a special discount to all of our newsletter subscribers. If you aren’t on our email list, head over to the website & sign up for an account. You can then opt into the newsletter.

We have hundreds of Halloween badges to choose from, from pumpkin badges to ghost badges and witch badges. We have such a great range, so go check them out & grab some to give out this Halloween.

Right, we are off to start carving pumpkins & decorating the workshop in preparation for all the Halloween badge orders coming in. We also need to come up with costume ideas for the workshop. We are thinking of doing a The Walking Dead theme this year. Bring on the fake blood & zombie makeup.

Long time customers & followers of Kool Badges may remember a few years ago we lived down in Cornwall & operated Kool Badges from our workshop on the mid cornwall coast. We where forced to move away for a number of personal reasons but we are now happy to announce that we have returned to the same village we lived in a few years ago. The village hasn’t changed much & they still do a lot of filming here (the village is Charlestown, Cornwall). Last time we lived here they filmed Dr Who & a few hollywood movies. This time it seems that Poldark fever has taken over. We saw them filming just last week.

It’s great to be back down in Cornwall. The chilled out vibe & friendly people are perfect for us. The weather is to die for & the food is amazing. It’s quite tedious living in a holiday hotspot during the summer months but this is more than made up for in the great places to eat & drink & the stunning scenery. Also it’s great in the winter when it’s only locals & everywhere looks also festive and romantic.

The Kool Badges workshop is back up & running with only a few days of downtime & we hope to bring you even better designs & service in 2016. We need your help though guys, so please do continue to share our badges with your friends & family & help spread the word. We cannot do this without you lovely people.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures of our new workshop & surroundings.

Vicki & John
Koolbadges

I Love Badges are so popular. We make loads of I love badges. Naturally we love badges, we spend all day designing & making them for you guys, but did you know that you can make your I love badge say anything you like? If you Love dogs or football, cars or cycling. Whatever you love, you can enter your text in the box on our custom I love badge page and add it to your cart. You can do this as many times as you like to make loads of unique custom, I love badges.

We already have a load of I Love badges, but it’s impossible for us to list badges covering everything you love. So we came up with the custom I love badge maker. Give it a try.

Teachers seem to love our I Love badges, from our I Love Science badges through to I Love Psychology badges & I Love physics badges, we have something for all teachers. They are so cheap & ideal to give out to your students. We already deal with a load of schools but if you are a teacher or work in a school check out our selection of badges & spread the word. If you don’t see your subject, or you would like to create a more personal badge, you can use our Custom I Love badge page to produce your customised badges.

I’ve added a few photos of recent I love badge orders we have made. As always, all of these badges are handmade in our UK workshop from UK sourced parts. We recycle the very little waste we produce, and we make sure we use local businesses for all of our other stationary & supplies. Also, our print shop is a local independent business. Please help support handmade businesses like ours, you guys mean the world to u

Vicki & John
Koolbadges.co.uk

 

People always ask us for cheap badges. It’s hard for us to do often as we are still a family run badge company, hand making all of your orders. Whenever we run a sale, it’s manic, and it takes us many extra days to process your orders. The last thing we would want is for people to spend ages waiting on their badges.

What’s more, quality badges can’t always be cheap. Many people online nowadays offer cheap badges, but their customer service & quality of the final product often reflect this price tag. We are committed to producing the highest quality badges at a great price. We always use local, professional print companies to print out all of our designs, this costs much more than printing them in house but guarantees an excellent print quality. It also keeps other local businesses busy. We buy all of our badge components and presses right here in the UK, which costs more than buying them in cheap from China, but it’s ethical & fits in perfectly with our ethos. In fact, we buy everything from web hosting to jiffy bags from independent UK businesses.

 We ship our badges all over the world & if you spend over £40 you can opt for free delivery. It still costs to post them out, but we pay for it ourselves. 

We also pride ourselves on customer service. If you have ever emailed us, you will know we try to respond to all emails as quickly as we can. We love what we do & we love all of our customers. Without you, we couldn’t make our awesome badges. We hope you continue to support hand made businesses & remember that we try to charge a fair price which makes it fair for you & us. It’s hard for us to compete with companies who setup on eBay and produce low quality, inferior badges. It’s hard for us to compete with companies who have automated their whole process or have their badges made cheaply in China, but we try every day to be the most fun & hopefully one of the nicest companies you deal with. We love you all & we hope you recommend our small slice of the internet to all of your friends & family.

Now please do enjoy the 90p sale, make the most of some awesome badges & if you feel like it send our link to your friends & family or share it on your social networks, that would mean the world to us.

Vicki & John
The Koolbadges Workshop
https://www.koolbadges.co.uk