22/5: London 2012 Pins from USA and Pin Licensing!

Late on Friday a few readers started receiving mailings about 24 commemorative (i.e. retail) pins available in the US. Just to be clear, these are official pins made under licence, but they are not part of the 2,012 pins being made by Honav UK, they are manufactured under a different LOCOG licence.

Before I talk about the pins, I just wanted to try and cover pin licensing, so after speaking to people with more experience than me on the subject, the position seems to be that LOCOG awards 2 licences for manufacturing pins that contain the London 2012 Games Marks (logo, mascots, "London 2012" etc.). One has gone to Honav UK to make pins for a worldwide market except the USA and one has gone to Aminco via the US Olympic Committee (USOC) to make pins for the USA market. Both sets of pins are allowed to use the Games Marks and LOCOG approves all the designs.

In addition to this, all NOCs are permitted to make pins with the Olympic Rings, and so NOCs can use any manufacturer they please and do not need to get LOCOG approval unless they wish to use the Games Marks. Kingdom Pins is one example of a manufacturer who will be making a number of pins for various NOCs.

The whole Olympic licensing model is extremely complex and this description is only meant to be an idiots guide to the pin licensing subject. If I have made a mistake or mis-interpreted something I apologise and will happily update the description if anyone has a better overview. I have tried a couple of times to get this information from official sources, but have not been successful.

Anyway, back to the pins. They are made by Aminco for retail only in the US. There are 24 pins broken into themes such as logo, mascot and icons. There are pins showing London Landmarks as well as a taxi, phone box. teapot and map of Britain in the Union Flag branding. I'm trying to get permission to use the images on the blog, but until that time can only direct you to one of the retailers - Classic Pins. I am not endorsing this retailer - just saying that they have images of all the pins which are well laid out. There are other retailers that have some of these pins. These pins are due to be available from the end of June.

If I get any more information on the pins, then I'll post again.