Project record
The same 400 pins, quoted at two sizes
A Southern California team compared 2.25-inch against 3-inch at the same quantity — the clearest side-by-side size quote in this collection.
Winchester · CA · Inland Empire
- Quantity
- 400 pins
Gallery
Image frames are in place with their final filenames and alt text. The binaries are held pending rights clearance and a minors review; dropping them in is a data change.
The brief
Two sizes quoted side by side at 400 pins — 2.25 inch against 3 inch — with glitter and a slider on the table.
How the design got made
- Beat 1400 pins, with sizes compared at 2.25 and 3.0 inches
- Beat 2Price spread of $2.20 to $3.70 depending on size and features
- Beat 3Glitter and a slider both discussed during the quote
The full account
What a size actually costs
Most teams pick a size before they see what the alternative costs. This order was quoted both ways at the same quantity, which makes it the clearest illustration here of what the decision is worth.
Four hundred pins, priced at 2.25 inches and at 3 inches, with glitter and a slider on the table. Across those variables the per-pin price ranged from $2.20 to $3.70.
How to read that spread
Size is the biggest single driver of price, and it's also the biggest driver of whether a pin gets traded. Those two facts pull against each other, and the resolution isn't the same for every team:
- Trading hard at a destination tournament — go larger. Under two inches gets skipped, and the bigger sizes are what other teams chase.
- Buying mainly for your own players and families — the smaller size puts more pins in more hands for the same money.
Add-ons stack on top. Glitter is mixed into the enamel of a chosen colour rather than applied over it, so it doesn't wear. A slider moves along a track and needs solid metal at its anchor — it works on substantial central elements and not on thin ones.
Where they are
Winchester sits in Riverside County, in the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. Worth stating, because there are Winchesters in Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Indiana — this one is California, confirmed by the shipping address.
Specification
| Team | Arsenal Elite |
|---|---|
| Sport | Baseball |
| Quantity | 400 |
| Upgrades | glitter, slider |
| Event confirmed | Not confirmed |
| City | Winchester |
| State | CA |
| County | Riverside County |
| Region | Inland Empire |
The banner threshold
This order sat under the threshold, so no banner was included. The line falls at 1,000 pins at 2.0 inches or larger: at that point the size step costs $0.20 more per pin — $1.07 to $1.27 — and brings a free 3ft × 6ft banner plus 100 bonus gold-metal or blackout pins with it.
Worth checking before you commit to a quantity: the bigger pin is frequently the cheaper total order.
What the customer said
No publishable customer sentence exists in this order thread, so none is shown. Everything below the header on this page is drawn from the order record itself: sizes, quantities, proof rounds and dates. Nothing here is a testimonial, and we do not write one.
Questions this order answers
Two inches or larger is the working floor for tournament trading — smaller pins get passed over. Sizes run from 2 inches up to 6.
One little league's four orders across three years show the migration in practice: they started at 1.25 inches and moved to 2.0. Larger sizes also unlock the banner threshold, which is why the bigger pin often costs less in total.
Sourced — Sizing guidance across multiple orders; Northern Virginia little league, 2022–2026
Glitter is mixed into the enamel of a chosen colour rather than applied on top, so it won't rub off. It's specified per colour — one glitter colour, or several.
It's commonly used on a single accent area: the shape of a state, a star, a puck. A 1,500-pin association order ran one glitter colour across the whole run; another design used gold glitter only on the state-shaped element.
Sourced — Multiple 2025–26 orders
No, and it's worth knowing before you fall in love with a layout. A moving element needs enough solid metal around its anchor point to survive being handled. Thin, spindly shapes won't hold.
On one hockey design the customer asked to make the stick-and-puck a slider. The answer was that the blade and puck couldn't carry it, with a counter-proposal to spin the round logo in the centre instead. Round, chunky, central elements move; delicate outlying ones don't.
The same constraint applies to fine cut-outs. A multi-piece design with lots of small connecting bridges gets flagged in production before it's ever tooled — one puzzle-piece pin set had to be re-engineered because, in the shop's words, it would 'never hold up in production.'
Sourced — Two 2025 orders — production art direction