If you’ve been to a Disney park in the last twenty years, odds are you’ve come across
the seemingly endless amount of Disney pins that are sold, collected, and traded on a
daily basis.
It has become almost a staple of the Disney park experience.
Today we’re going to explore the origins of Disney Pin trading, and to do that we have
to go back over 120 years.
The origins of Disney pin trading actually takes us to the modern Olympic games, and
those began in Athens in 1896.
During that first event, athletes, Olympic officials, and journalists were given small
badges made of cardboard to wear to identify themselves.
From here two paths would develop over the course of Olympic history that would eventually
merge into one.
For the 1912 summer Olympic games in Stockholm, Sweden, commemorative metal pins were made
and sold to spectators.
Unlike cardboard, metal pins make for great souvenirs.
They’re small, easy to manufacture, easy to ship, and affordable.
By this point the cardboard badges used by athletes and officials at the games had also
been replaced with metal variants.
By the 1924 olympics in Paris, France, a hobby began to take shape.
Athletes were beginning to trade their badges with other athletes in other countries as
a gesture of goodwill and friendship.
It wasn’t a big tradition at that point, but it would be the seed that would eventually
grow into something much larger.
Back on the spectator side, there would be more development at the 1960 Squaw Valley
games, when a company called Sylvania Electric would become the first corporate sponsor to
design and issue their own commemorative pin to go along with the olympic pins.
That, too, began a slowly growing trend of expanding the pin offerings more and more
every 4 years at the next Olympics.
The 1980 Lake Placid games are where the two really started to explode into one large hobby.
By that point the pins for the Olympic games expanded to include pins for specific nations
taking part, sports being played, sponsors and mascots, and even pins for the different
media outlets covering the event.
Not only were athletes trading pins with one another, but so were spectators.
Because we were still in the midst of the cold war, soviet pins were especially popular
for collectors and this is also when we would begin to see pin trading clubs appear.
From there the craze just got bigger.
Traders and collectors were spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars on pins.
Remember this wasn’t the consistent stream of pins we see today with Disney.
These were limited engagements that only occurred every four years.
This also predates e-commerce and the rise of the internet.
So trying to get all of the pins you wanted to collect was a much more difficult task
back then.
In 1996 at the Atlanta game the craze would perhaps reach a peak.
A company called Aminco International created and sold over 1000 pin designs for the two-week
event and estimated that they would, in total, sell over 35 million pins.
What’s interesting is that the value of certain pins would fluctuate over the course
of the games depending on the outcome of the games themselves.
If an underdog nation found itself unexpectedly winning the gold medal in an event, that nation’s
pin set would also find itself becoming much more desired by collectors.
Pin trading would naturally continue on to the 1998 Olympic games in Nagano, Japan, and
that’s where members of Disney would take note of the lucrative and popular hobby.
They were planning for a 15-month long Millennium celebration in Walt Disney World.
They decided that bringing the custom over to their parks would be a fun way to create
keepsakes, encourage guests from around the world to meet and interact with one another,
and of course make some money.
Now Disney pins as a concept had already existed at this point.
Like I said earlier, pins in general made for good souvenirs, and so Disney pins in
one form or another could be found as far back as the 1950’s in Disneyland.
They just weren’t especially popular or unpopular up until that point, and there certainly
weren’t as many as there are today.
They were just normal souvenirs.
When the celebration began in October of 1999, the official pin trading stations were limited
to 7 areas across the parks.
The entire pin trading concept itself was meant to only run as long as the celebration,
and was initially planned to end after 15 months.
Merchandising spokesman Steven Miller said “We really had no idea whether people would
be interested in this.”
Well spoiler alert: People were definitely interested in it.
Just as it did at the Olympics over the previous 20 years, pin collecting and trading exploded
at Disney World.
It tapped into all the same psychological reasons that drive people to collect stamps
and coins and anything else you can think of.
People take pride in building a collection.
They feel satisfaction of out obtaining a complete set.
They socialize and experience a camaraderie with fellow collectors and traders.
Take all of that, and add on decades and decades of characters that are beloved staples of
modern media, and it’s really no surprise that it caught on like wildfire and still
continues to this day.
More cast members were given pins for trading, and within the year the number of pin trading
stations expanded from that initial 7 locations to over 30.
On top of that, during the 15 month millennium celebration, Disney was introducing new pin
designs every single day.
While they never officially disclosed any sales figures, Walt Disney World Director
of Merchandise, Brand Management, and Special Events, Linda Conrad, went on the record to
say that Disney pin sales “made up a substantial part of the millennium revenues.”
So as you’d expect, Disney quickly decided to extend the program indefinitely and also
went on to expand the merchandise to Disneyland and their other resorts.
Today the hobby is still going strong and there are over 100,000 Disney pin designs out there.
They not only include pins that guests are able to purchase online and at the parks,
but also limited edition pins, cast member pins, and event pins.
There are countless websites dedicated to collecting, trading, and cataloging the pins.
There are even meetups, not just at the Disney Parks, but across the globe, where collectors
can show off their pins and trade with one another.
Today It would be impossible to go a full day at the Disney parks without coming across the pins.
They are a fun and exciting aspect of a Disney vacation, and it all began with these little
cardboard badges in 1896.