CULTURE
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Press the Button St. Louis’ ButtonMakers shop celebrates twenty years in business Written by
DANIEL HILL
S
t. Louis’ Cherokee Streetbased ButtonMakers shop took an unlikely path to get to where it is today. It’s a story that started two decades ago, and one that saw the shop’s owner, St. Louis native Rebecca Bolte, crisscrossing the country from Florida to Washington state before settling back in her hometown. During her time away from Missouri, she lived as part of a DIY punk collective in Florida, watched her business grow in a Seattle warehouse and even royally pissed off the handlers of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews during some time spent working at the Democratic National Convention. Through it all, ButtonMakers has been her financial mainstay — and as it reaches its twentieth birthday this year, Bolte says she has every intention to keep it that way. Bolte, now 40, says she set out on her own at the age of nineteen, and that ButtonMakers initially started as a screenprinting shop duplicating CDs for Indiana’s Plan-It-X Records. “I met them through this band This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb,” Bolte says of Plan-It-X. “I lived in a punk collective with them in Florida, and they were on Plan-It-X, I believe, and that’s how I met those guys. They just needed somebody to make their CDs — it’s like a DI record label, you know? So we literally ust got — there’s a store in Seattle called RE-PC, and we just got this bank of computers at the time and were literally just duplicating CDs that way, screenprinting the labels on them and sending them off to Indiana. That’s how we got started.” At the time, the company that
Rebecca Bolte first launched ButtonMakers in 2001 out of a Seattle warehouse. | COURTESY OF BUTTONMAKERS would become known as ButtonMakers was housed in Seattle as well, in what Bolte describes as “a windowless warehouse with a bunch of dumpster-diving crazy crusty punks” living in it. As time went on, Plan-It-X tapped Bolte to screenprint their shirts for them as well. Soon, they asked about buttons. “So we went online looking for a place to buy equipment to do that, and we couldn’t find any place that was selling that stuff,” Bolte explains. “We had to search the patent office to find a manufacturer. And so we got the equipment, we fulfilled our customer’s order, and it just kind of dawned on us that since there was no internet presence for buttonmaking supplies in 2001 that we should start retailing that stuff, too.” Bolte says she put together a section of what was then her punk merch website just for but-
ton-making machines and equipment. Before long, she was sold out of everything. “Most of our customers were, like, churches and schools and nonprofits, and probably not super interested in all the weird punk-rock stuff we were selling as well,” Bolte laughs. “So we then launched buttonmakers.net to be its own entity, and it eventually ust took over — it was so much more popular than any of the other things we were doing that eventually it became its own thing. “The biggest clients are nonprofits — they’re school districts, municipalities — stuff like that,” she adds. “So people who are just not in that [punk] world at all.” Bolte’s goods and services weren’t just popular with neighborhood organizations and the like, though. Soon enough, she was tapped to work Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presiden-
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tial campaigns, and even do some work at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. “We just got a phone call from MSNBC,” Bolte explains. “Well, the design firm that MS BC had hired was doing a brand activation at the Democratic National Convention, and they hired us to do onsite buttons. So people would come over and get their name on a button. We made well over 1 , buttons in a day — it was incredible. And I almost spilled coffee on Jesse Jackson, it was great.” That close call with Jesse Jackson wasn’t her only brush with celebrity that week, though. One day, as she and her team were wrapping up and heading out, they ran afoul of Hardball anchor Chris Matthews. “We had worked that entire convention; it was just wall-towall people. We worked our
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