Unsolicited Marketing Advice

Good customer service and safety standards encourage your employees wear their name badges in a clearly visible manner, but sometimes this can be a challenge.

Name tags with simple pins are common in restaurant and retail businesses, but corporate organizations generally issue a name badge. Frequently these are embedded with a proximity reader, bar code, or other “smart chip” devices for security, identification, or time card purposes. Such badges generally have clips, which work well enough for employees with suit coats. Shed the jacket; however, and the name badge creates the dreaded droopy pocket syndrome.

Lanyards are often employed in such situations, but these may involve safety concerns, even with break-away connectors. In addition, a lanyard still positions the name badge around the navel, rather than where it is clearly visible to customers in the upper body area.

Badge Supports, LLC has now created a very nice option for shirts or scrubs that include a breast pocket. Their Nerd-Buster Badge Support slips into a shirt pocket providing an easy way of displaying a vertical or horizontal badge. The device also includes a tab that sticks up to attach a recognition or ribbon pin. Versions are available to hold a few business cards (I’m always forgetting to bring my cards to vendor meetings!), or may be pre-printed with a logo, calendar, mission statement, commonly used chemical formulae, or safety information (such as your organization’s overhead paging codes). These features make the badge support a unique idea for vendors to give away at trade shows or Human Resource departments to purchase in bulk for their organization.

Name Badge Links
Unsolicited’s crack research staff has scoured the Internet for solutions to droopy pocket syndrome and found these resources:

• Badge Supports, LLC – The best approach we discovered, economically priced and Michigan-based (founded by a former automotive engineer like my father so they get extra brownie points).
• Arm Band Badge Holders – May be appropriate with lifeguards or staff in T-shirts, we suppose.
• Pocketprotectors.com and securityimaging.com produce Pocket Protectors with Name Badge Holders – An option for those that carry pens, pencils or other items in their shirt pocket.
• Government ID Badge Holders from Evolution Card Systems & Badge Supplies – Rigid, color-coded, magnetic, arm band and other badge holders for school, military or government use.
• Badge straps with hole or with extra loop – Versions of straps without the ubiquitous clip for use with necklaces, reels, tube lanyards or the like.
• Badge Holders, Lanyards, Badge Clips, Badge Reels and more – from IDwholesaler.com