Pin Grading Scale

I make enamel pins. They're handmade. Not in the sense that I carve each one with a tiny knife. Handmade in the sense that they go through a factory where humans pour enamel into tiny metal lines, by hand, hundreds of times a day. Inevitably some come out wrong.

That's all this is. Standards came out roughly right. Seconds didn't.

What "roughly right" means

There's no perfect pin. There never has been. A Standard is what I'd send to my mum and not flinch. The cleanest the batch produced.

If you put one under a phone-torch and squint, you'll find something. A tiny bubble in the enamel. A hair-width scratch. A spot of plating that didn't take on the side. Standards aren't free of those. They're just clean enough that a normal human, in normal light, won't notice.

What a Second is

Anything that didn't make Standard.

The range is wide. Could be a small fill spot in the wrong place. Could be a post missing. Could be both.

The kind of thing that lands a pin in Seconds: enamel that ran over the metal lines. A post glued slightly off-angle. Plating that skipped a strip on the side. Glitter pins that came out under-glittered. Fill that arrived in two different shades. Any of that. Sometimes more than one of those on the same pin.

You won't know which one you're getting. I don't pick them by flaw. You're paying less in exchange for that uncertainty.

What I do with the really bad ones

I don't sell them. The worst sometimes go free with orders so they get a home. The really worst get sent for metal recycling.

A few practical notes

I can't pick a specific Seconds for you. Once a batch is sorted, they go into a tray together and I grab whichever's on top when I'm packing an order. Hand-picking the right flaw for the right buyer isn't workable.

I also can't tell you in advance which flaw your Second has. I don't catalogue them one by one.

The one return I can't take is "the Second had a flaw". That's what they are. But if your pin arrived broken in transit, or I sent you the wrong thing, that's a real problem and I want to fix it. Send me a message.