Business Is Booming for Political Buttons

The urgent notice was sent out a week ago to subscribers of a peace-and-justice e-mail list in Humboldt County: “Button-makers needed!”

The political buttons, bearing slogans like “Peace Is Possible” and “Drop Bush Not Bombs,” have been flying off the shelves of a little-known company here that supplies buttons to bookstores, nonprofit groups and activists.

“We’re sending out thousands of buttons every day,” said Shannon Sandlin, manager of the Peace Resource Project, which operates out of an aging Victorian building in this liberal North Coast college town. “Business has tripled since October.”

In slower times, one part-time button-maker could easily keep up with demand, Sandlin said. But with protests against a war with Iraq over the weekend in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities, the company was overwhelmed with orders it feared it could not fill. Five people sat at small machines on Wednesday, punching out buttons, for which they are paid 5 cents each.

The company, which offers about 600 buttons and 300 bumper stickers, was founded in 1982 and claims to be the only large-scale wholesaler of such products in California, Sandlin said. It has shipped to every state in the country, as well as to England and Japan. Most orders are placed through the company’s Web site.

Nonprofit groups order the products at wholesale prices to sell from their literature tables at antiwar protests. Bookstores and gift shops buy them as novelty items. Some people hawk the items individually. One longtime customer, Jerry Rubin, sells nothing but bumper stickers at his booth on the Santa Monica Pier, Sandlin said.

Bookstores that used to stick to apolitical buttons, such as “Think Good Thoughts,” for instance, are asking for the antiwar messages because their customers want them, she said.

Seeing them makes people think, “Maybe I can stand up and say what I feel, too,” she said.