What a rush actually costs.

Three things nothing else here records

Most of this library is about size, quantity and design. This small order happens to document three practical things that never come up elsewhere.

#a player's number. The rush charge

$75, as a line item.

Price shown is what this order was quoted at, for this quantity, size and specification, on this date. It is not a current price list.

Rush charges are real and they are usually invisible until the invoice. Worth understanding what you are buying: not faster manufacturing — the moulding and enamel work take the time they take — but priority in the queue and faster freight.

A hundred pins at 1.5 inch were quoted at $2.69 each, with 1.0 inch twelve cents cheaper at $2.57. The rush sat on top of that as its own charge.

quoted for this order only — quoted for that order only.

If your date is soft, the rush charge is the easiest money to save in a pin order. If it's a tournament, it isn't optional.

#a player's number. Glow in the dark

$0.35 a pin — and the quote came with a chart showing how the colours actually look in the dark, which matters more than it sounds.

quoted for this order only — quoted for that order only.

Glow pigment is not a colour you add on top of a design. It is a specific set of pigments with their own limited palette, and they look markedly different lit and unlit. A design that reads well in daylight can glow as an unrecognisable shape. Asking to see the chart before committing is the right instinct.

At thirty-five cents this is one of the cheaper upgrades available — less than half a spinner.

#a player's number. Die-cut shapes have a limit

The customer asked whether the pin could be cut to the outline of the artwork rather than a circle. Yes — and with a caveat:

"you don't want the drip areas too much or they could break off in shipping"

Thin protruding parts snap. A die-cut pin is a piece of stamped metal; anything narrow sticking out — a bat handle, a tail, a lightning bolt, a drip — is a weak point, and pins spend a week in a box travelling from a factory.

The fix is not to abandon the shape but to thicken the thin parts or pull the outline in. Decided at proof stage it costs nothing; discovered on delivery it is a hundred broken pins.

The order

100 pins at 1.5 inch, die struck soft enamel, proof V1A. Quoted and ordered inside a day against an 11 July deadline.

Why this one is here

Because rush charges, glow rates and die-cut fragility are exactly the things a first-time buyer finds out too late.