Business on pinpoint
The making of an Olympic pin is hardly simple
It is sometimes hard for Ian Tait to imagine that those lapel pins that people buy by the tens of thousands at Olympic Games in every conceivable shape and size all start out as pieces of formless metal, to which a surprising amount of high-tech attention is paid.
"Just look at that work. You can't imagine how much effort goes into making this," he says as he runs his fingers over a stunningly beautiful pin of an antlered deer, whose throat and chest rise up from a dark brown at the bottom to a blended tan to a bone white on the whithers. Every one of those colours has been hand-applied with a hypodermic needle, making each pin subtly different from the next.
The pin Tait is talking about is a head of a stag made for the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games, made in the traditional "cloisonné" style of glass-applied metal work of art that has a myriad of colours. It is one of only 1,000 made, and it sits in his pin bag as an example of the finest style of pin-making.
Tait, the general manager of Artiss Aminco, which has the exclusive contract to provide pins for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, has brought over an array of lapel pins to show just how these souvenirs are made. They range from simple buttons to pieces of interlocking shrapnel that would weigh down even the strongest general.
There are two-tone silver and gold metal pins. There are simple die-stamped images to which soft enamel has been applied. There are even papered pins over which a plastic cover has been attached.
But it is the intricate die-stamped, three-dimensional pins with the finest glass or resin colors that stand out the most.
History records that the forerunner to today's lapel pins were likely brooches made in the 12th Century in Egypt and Mesopotamia, possibly from colored ceramics or pottery.
Tait, who worked for BC Hydro for years before working on the 2010 bid, is a pin collector at heart. He says there is something magical about finding or trading a pin, even if it is one of the cheaper ones.
"Every pin begins as a memory. It is not a lapel pin, it is a connection to a person, place, time or event," he said. "You may not remember some things, but most people will know exactly who gave them that pin they treasure."
Tait speaks from experience. He still has the first pin he ever received. "It was in 1967, I was a young scout, and it was a pin for my first provincial jamboree in Penticton."
In the Olympic world, pin-trading got its start at the very start of the modern Olympics.
"It started in 1896, at the first Games," Tait said. "The athletes and officials were all given cardboard discs to identify themselves, and many of them traded with each other."
The first Olympic sponsor pin -- which unlike retail pins are not sold but are given away by companies as rewards or for promotional purposes --was a pin made by a Finnish margarine company in 1920, Tait said.
Today's pins have come a long way, but the best of them are still made in the refined cloisonné style (pronounced cloy-so-nay), which is French for "partitioned".
Tait says there are as many as six steps in making a pin, from developing the art concept to colourizing it, approving it and making the dies, to making pre-production and post-production samples.
Most pins start out as a blank piece of copper, zinc or steel. The finished artwork is transferred and engraved into a hard metal die that is used to stamp out images from the roll of blanks. Depending on the type of pin and how intricate it is, it goes through one, two, and even as many as three or four stamps.
The first die stamp usually builds the impression in the metal, including the cloisons, or cavities, that will be filled with colours. The second stamp cuts the rough pin away from the excess metal. If the pin has cut-out areas inside, or requires background applications such as a pebbled surface, it is stamped again.
And that's just the automated part of the job. The next part is the most laborious.
Every one of those cavities in the pin now must be filled by hand with the colour scheme.
"There is no room for error. There has to be a high degree of accuracy, because a single colour put into the wrong cavity changes the pin," he said.
The pin has to be fired in an oven for each colour, meaning a pin with five colours requires five firings. After the colour application process, the pin is buffed and cleaned to make the surrounding metal stand out. If the scheme calls for the pin to have gold or silver plating, it goes through an electroplating process to apply a tiny amount of the precious metal.
In today's world, true cloisonné glass pins are collector-grade. But they are also the most expensive to make. Hence, the industry has adapted new materials to bring down the cost, including resins, hard and soft enamels, and paper images in plastic domes, the latter of which are usually sponsored giveaways at corporate and public functions.
Just who buys these tiny pieces of art? "Everyone," Tait said. "I like to say my job isn't to sell a pin, it is to create a collector." The pin-trading world is the subject of a story for another day.
For the 2010 Olympics, Artiss Aminco will produce about 800 to 900 retail designs, including series on sports, landscapes, heritage sites and even the most whimsical, such as a flashing Halloween pumpkin.
The company is a venture of two of the largest pin-makers in North America, California-based Aminco, which has done every Olympics since 1996, and Laurie Artiss Ltd., a Regina-based company that is the largest of its kind in Canada.
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