baumwolle said:
(it must be a factor of the kind of equipment they use)
Highly unlikely.
I'm actually in that business myself (suppose that cat just came out of the bag), and there aren't actually that many different equipment manufacturers out there.
There's a few brands of manual presses, and I only know of one automatic (there may well be more, but they're not prominent). 99% of businesses would be using the same manual hand press. There are a couple of brands out there that are thoroughly craptacular, but I've never heard of a professional (or even semi-professional) business attempting to use them - they tend to only suck in home users and avid crafters.
It's possible that the badge parts come from different manufacturers (I'm very happy with my supplier, so I haven't experimented with other companies parts), so that could make a difference. I suspect that all the parts can probably be traced back to the same factory though.
The biggest two factors are going to be the printer the company uses, and how lazy they are when they press a badge. It's not a difficult process, but obviously if you're doing a lot it can get tedious. Mistakes can slip through, although to be honest it's pretty fool-proof.
I'm not sure how many businesses are using an automatic press - I don't know of a single one that states they do, but obviously some of the higher volume places must be. The majority of businesses in the field are very small though, and the business is spread between them. Most of them wouldn't feel justified in buying an automatic press.
You may notice a quality difference between manual and automatic, but I doubt it. The manual presses produce a perfect quality product, and while I haven't used an auto-press they're a relatively expensive piece of equipment (which is why most companies don't own one) and I seriously doubt they're anything other than perfectly precise. The main difference is labour (and potential strain) and speed (not surprisingly an automatic machine can
far outpace a manual).
A very, very,
very high percentage of button businesses are very small (or at least started that way) and are run by college-aged alternative kids - basically they're run by the largest demographic who uses them. As a consequence, some of them are extremely unprofessional.
If I was looking for someone to make me 1" buttons I would judge the book by its cover - look for a professional and clean website and the usual trappings of a successful business. A lot of them are small businesses puffing themselves up, but that doesn't really matter - they should do the job just as well. It's not a difficult business, so if someone can be bothered putting on the trappings of success, they'll probably bother to take the care to give you professional results.
I know what you mean about the bad xeroxes though... I've seen some shockingly bad attempts out there. This would mostly be because people are trying to just use their home inkjet to print the buttons instead of buying a good quality printer more suited to the job. Because buttons are so small the image resolution is very important - you might not notice the grain on a full size photo from that printer, but when the entire image fits within an inch it becomes a lot more noticeable.
As for outsourcing vs. DIY... it's easy to learn and it doesn't cost a lot - but it is time consuming. It's not expensive to get them outsourced (and there's still good margins in the product if you do), so you're probably better off concentrating on maximising profit in other areas of business. Still, if you find you have spare time and want to increase your margins, it is one area you could look at doing inhouse.
