How We Design and Make Our Pride Pins (Behind the Scenes)

Enamel pins

We're Delwin and Jimmy, co-founders of Proud Zebra, a queer-owned Canadian small business. Our most-asked question at festival booths isn't how do I start a pin business? It's are these handmade? The honest answer: no, we don't melt enamel on our kitchen counter. But we design every pin ourselves, work with factories we trust, and pack every order by hand from British Columbia. This piece is the full behind-the-scenes look at how a Proud Zebra pin actually goes from a sketch on Delwin's iPad to a small enamel object on someone's lapel, and why we make the choices we do at each step.

How are enamel pins actually made?

Enamel pins are small metal badges where coloured enamel sits in recessed areas of a stamped metal design. The two main types are hard enamel (polished smooth and flush with the metal, the higher-end finish) and soft enamel (textured, with the metal edges raised above the colour). Proud Zebra pins are hard enamel.

The process is more involved than most people picture. A finished pin passes through roughly seven stages.

For a deeper technical primer on the manufacturing tradition behind these objects, the Wikipedia entry on lapel pins covers the broader history of pin-making across button, jewelry, and badge traditions. The hard enamel process specifically descends from cloisonné, a metalworking technique that goes back centuries.

How do we design a Proud Zebra pin from scratch?

Every Proud Zebra pin starts as a sketch on Delwin's iPad. Before any factory is involved, the design has to clear three things in-house.

Proud cubes pride pins explainer youtube thumbnail

Concept and meaning. We don't make a pin just because a flag exists. The piece has to have a reason. Our Proud Cube series, for example, started because we wanted a pride pin that looked like a small object (a Rubik's-cube-style miniature) instead of a flag flat on a lapel. Most of our identity-specific designs go through three or four sketch rounds before we move to colour.

Flag accuracy. Every identity flag has specific colour codes. The bisexual flag is not generic pink, purple, and blue, it's specific Pantone values that the community recognizes. Getting them wrong is the difference between a piece that reads as flag-correct and one that reads as a knockoff. Delwin pulls reference from primary sources (the original flag designer's notes where they exist, the most-cited community references where they don't) and matches the Pantone before the file ever goes to the factory.

Manufacturability. Hard enamel has constraints. Lines that are too thin won't stamp cleanly. Colour wells that are too small won't hold enamel evenly. Designs with too many adjacent colours risk bleeding during the fill stage. We've redesigned pieces multiple times because the first prototype showed a flaw that wasn't visible on screen.

Once a design clears those three filters, we send the file plus a colour sheet to the factory and wait for the first prototype. A prototype almost never comes back perfect on the first try. Common revisions: tweaking line weights, shifting a Pantone half a step warmer or cooler, adjusting metal thickness, or rethinking how the post is positioned so the pin sits flat on a lapel.

Over 200 Proud Zebra LGBTQ+ pride enamel pins arranged

"LOVE the Inclusive Pride Flag Cube! Creative, eye-catching design. High quality and much more durable than other pins. Cute packaging and fast shipping. I bought a whole box to share with all my friends."
Anne G., on the Inclusive Pride Proud Cubes

Hexagon-shaped Proud Cube enamel pins

Why don't we just make our pins by hand?

This is the most-asked design question we get, so it's worth answering plainly: hard enamel pins genuinely cannot be made on a kitchen table. The process needs steel dies, stamping presses, kilns that hit roughly 850°C, and plating baths. None of those are home equipment. A small studio can make resin pins, button pins, or wood pins by hand. Hard enamel pins are factory work.

So when people ask if our pins are handmade, the honest answer is no, and that's why we don't use the word "handmade" in our product descriptions. What we do is design every pin in-house, work with factory partners we've vetted on quality and ethics, and pack every order ourselves once the pins arrive in BC. Calling that "handmade" would be misleading. Calling it "designed and packed by us, made to our specs by partner factories" is accurate.

What we look for in a factory partner: hard enamel specialization (rather than generic metal-goods production), a willingness to do prototype iterations on small runs, fair labour practices we can verify, and consistent QC on the production runs that follow. We've changed factories before when quality slipped. Our current factories ship pins to us in batches with a defect rate well under 1%; the ones that fail QC at our end (chipped enamel, bent posts, misaligned colour) get pulled and reordered before any customer sees them.

"This lapel pin surpassed my expectations! It is very well made and you can feel it. I have really appreciated the double post feature keeping it securely in place always."
Alsalinas, on the Inclusive Pride Proud Cubes

The double-post that customer mentions is one of those design decisions we made specifically to solve a wear problem. A single-post pin spins on the wearer's lapel; a double-post pin stays oriented. We added it to the Proud Cube series after early reviews flagged the spin issue. That's the kind of detail factory partnership lets us iterate on; making one pin by hand wouldn't.

How does every order get packed and shipped?

When pins arrive in BC from the factory, they don't go straight to customers. They get inspected by us first. Each pin gets pulled, looked at under good light, and either approved for stock or set aside as a second. The seconds (small chips, off-centre enamel, a hair-thin scratch) are kept in a separate bin and either reworked, sold at a discount as B-grade, or scrapped if they're below standard.

Delwin smiling and pointing at the yellow storage bins

From there, every order gets packed by hand. Jimmy runs most of the packing, pulling pins from inventory, matching them to the order sheet, slipping them into their backing cards, padding the envelope, and sealing it for the post office. He'll stop and rework an order if he sees something that shouldn't ship: a clasp that doesn't grip, a backing card with a printing flaw, a pin that looks fine in the bin but reveals a tiny issue when it's about to go in the envelope.

We get notes from customers about this part more than any other.

"It is beautifully designed and made with high quality materials. Plus the co-founder, Jimmy, was a delight to interact with and provided such thoughtful customer service."
Jillian, on the Lesbian Identity Cube Pin

That kind of small-business contact (actually getting a reply from one of the people who made the thing) is the part of running this brand that doesn't scale, and that we don't want to. When you order from Proud Zebra, you're not ordering from a warehouse; you're ordering from us, with all the slowness and care that implies.

Jimmy Cheang

Customer wearing a hat

What if you want to start your own enamel pin business?

We get this question often enough to address it directly. Most people asking are either artists exploring whether pins are the right product for their work, or new sellers trying to compare manufacturers and pricing. Here's what we wish we'd known at the start.

Wholesale partners and media features including HarperCollins TJX and Come As You Are logos

Manufacturer minimum order quantities. Most hard-enamel factories have a minimum order quantity (MOQ) of 100 pieces per design. Some will go as low as 50 for testing, but the per-pin unit cost climbs sharply below 100. Plan your first run as 100 of one design rather than 25 of four designs.

Unit cost ranges. Hard enamel pins typically cost between $1.30 and $3.50 per unit at 100-piece runs, depending on size, colour count, and finish. A standard 1.25-inch hard enamel pin with 4-5 colours usually lands around $2.40 each at MOQ. Soft enamel is cheaper. Specialty finishes (glitter, glow, screen-print, double-post) add cost.

At Proud Zebra

Retail pricing. Most independent pin sellers price at 4-5x manufacturing cost to cover materials, shipping, packaging, time, and a small margin. A pin that costs $2.40 to make typically retails between $10 and $15. If you're under that 4x mark, the margin won't survive shipping costs and platform fees.

Production timeline. Budget 4-8 weeks from approved artwork to pins in your hands. That's roughly 2 weeks for die-making and prototyping, 2-4 weeks for production, and 1-2 weeks for shipping (faster by air, slower by sea). Factor this into any launch plan.

What we'd tell our 2020 selves. When we (Delwin and Jimmy) started Proud Zebra, we ordered 100 of our first pride pin design from an overseas factory, paid for it on a credit card, and stored the whole run in a closet in our apartment. We sold them at a single pride market that summer. Two things saved us: we picked a community we belonged to (we didn't have to guess what queer customers would want), and we kept the first run small enough that one bad batch wouldn't end the business. If you're starting out, those are the two we'd defend.

One of our first Proud Zebra booth setups at a holiday market

Beyond that: pick a factory partner that does hard-enamel as a specialty rather than as one product line among many. Insist on prototypes before production. Build a backing-card and packaging plan before your first run arrives, not after. And expect your second run to look better than your first, because by then you'll know what to fix.

Delwin Tan and Jimmy Cheang

What does it mean that a portion of every pin goes to LGBTQ+ charities?

Since 2020, every Proud Zebra order has carried a built-in donation to LGBTQ+ charities including Rainbow Refugee, Covenant House Vancouver, GLSEN, UNYA, and Sayoni (previously supported). As of 2026-05-13, that donation pipeline has totalled $10,219.58 CAD.

The six original Proud Zebra charity enamel pin designs

The mechanic is simple: a percentage of every order goes into a donation pool, and we transfer the pool to the listed charities on a recurring schedule. We don't run "Pride Month only" promo donations or cause-marketing campaigns. The percentage is the same in October as it is in June. Customers can see the running total on our site, and we update it after every donation cycle.

So when you wear a Proud Zebra pin, the small object is doing two things: signalling identity or allyship visibly, and quietly funding crisis support for queer kids. That's a feature of how the product is built, not a marketing layer on top.

Frequently asked questions

The bigger picture

We started Proud Zebra because we wanted pride accessories that were thoughtfully designed, accurately coloured, and built to last more than one Pride season. The behind-the-scenes process is how that intention shows up in the product: hours of sketching, factory partners we trust, prototype iterations no customer ever sees, and the two of us packing every order from BC.

Booth at Vancouver Pride

Jimmy at the Proud Zebra booth

If you'd like to see the finished pieces this process produces, browse our full pride pins collection, the Inclusive Pride Proud Cubes as the Proud Cube starter, or our full pride accessories guide for the wider range. For more on what pride pins represent culturally, see our pride pin history piece, our subtle pride pins guide for the workplace-friendly subset, or our complete guide to pride flags for the wider set of flags these pins represent.

The coolest LGBTQ+ pride pins

Delwin Tan and Jimmy Cheang

However you wear yours, we're proud to be the people behind the small object on your lapel.

Delwin and Jimmy