31/1: Retail Update

A few snippets of retail news.

Firstly some more pins officially 'sold out'. By this I mean that the manufacturer has no more stock available for retailers, however some retailers may have stock on their shelves. The Southwark borough pin showing the Globe theatre (pin 222) and the Wenlock mascot pin (232) are both sold out. I understand the remaining stock of the Southwark pin has gone to the Globe theatre themselves. Maybe some tie-in with the international festival of Shakespeare plays being performed as part of the Cultural Olympiad?

Also, a new retailer coming soon - Harrods will be stocking London 2012 pins in the next few weeks.

17/1: Valentines and Welcome to London Pins

The first pins of 2011 have been announced and they should be with us soon.

The first is a pair of pins celebrating Valentine's Day and show Wenlock and Mandeville in front of a large heart in the Union Flag design in 2012 colours.

Valentines 2001 Pins

Each pin is marked 'Happy Valentines Day 2011' and is only available in this limited edition set. The issue size is 2,012 pieces and the RRP is £16.00. This set fits very well with the limited edition mascot set issued alongside the mascot launch and I imagine these will sell fast. Pin numbers are 531 and 532.

No word yet on which retailers will be stocking them, but expect to see them available in the last week of January to give you enough time to buy them before Valentine's Day.

The other new pins announced today are a pair of 'Welcome to London' pins. These are 'dangle' pins which combine the Games logo and Paralympic Games logo with the words ' Welcome to London'.

'Welcome to London' pins

These pins are available separately at RRP of £6.50 and are limited to 10,000 and 5,000 pieces respectively. Pin numbers are 285 and 286. I believe these should be with retailers very soon. Again, no word on who is stocking these initially.

If any retailers are reading and would like to let me know their plans for stocking these pins, please drop me an email and I'll let the readers know.

Update 19/1: Glamorous Living have announced they have limited stocks of the Valentine's pin sets. Click here for their site.

12/1: Pin Bag Available

Ok, so how many of you have your pins in the drawer because you didn't have a way to display or transport them?

Finally the wait is over as the London 2012 official pin bag is now available. The first stockist I have seen with these is Glamorous Living. They are available to buy via their website - click here. They are priced at £45, so if you would like further information, contact them via their website or click here for email. 

With the number of pins available, maybe splitting them into more than one bag such as retail and sponsor may be the way to go, or perhaps one for a collection and one for traders?

I have used this retailer before and can confirm I had excellent service. If you contact them or decide to place an order, please let them know you found out about the bag from londonpins.co.uk.

9/1: Comparison of Guards

Now that the new guards set (exclusive to British Airways at present) has been release this week, I thought I'd show a quick comparison of 3 pins that each have 3 versions.

Version 1: The pin that was release in the guards set at 3 years to go in 2009
Version 2: The pin was that released on the 'doubles' cards in October 2010
Version 3: The 'BA' version released this week

The three pins are shown below. In each photo, version 1 in on the left, version 2 in the middle and version 3 on the right.

Pins 0053, 0237 and 0416

Pins 0052, 0234 and 0417

Pins 0073, 0235 and 0418

The most obvious differences are the increased size and change of placement of the logo in the version 3 pins. However there are some subtle differences too. Look at the numbers of buttons on the sentry guard or  the number and colours of medals on the beefeater.

Feel free to add any comments below if you spot other differences. 

As those pink guards pins will be replaced with red versions as time goes on, there will be even more guards varieties to find!

5/1: Guard Pin Colours

Good news for all of you who think that the pink Guards pins should be red. It seems that following requests from customers, guard pins issued in future will use the red colour rather than the pink.

This will affect the pins 0051-0055 in the Guards set and also pins 0234-0237 issued in pairs on cards. Although these pins are limited to 5,000 each, not all the pins are manufactured in one go. Existing stocks of pins with retailers will be used up and then the next 'batches' produced will be in the red colour. I'm unsure about the set issued yesterday and exclusive to BA, but I think these guards are in red and so unaffected by this change.

So that means for some of the pins, there will be two varieties to collect with the pink variety being rarer than the red. I'm trying to determine the approximate numbers of each variety for each pin and once the new colours are available, I will update the catalogue.

Pin 0237 in both pink and red varieties

Update: I have confirmed that there are less than 200 of each pin issued as 'doubles' on card in late 2010. So less than 4% of the issue will be in pink. This makes this one of the rarer variations at the moment, possibly more so than the pink/purple variations on the early pins.