Once a month, the back room of Manuel’s Tavern is closed.
On the third Monday of the month, the room is rented out by a group of Olympic pin collectors. Officially, the meeting starts at 5 p.m., but very little is official about this club, and many members show up beforehand to set up. Tables are covered in cork boards with hundreds of pins gently arranged on them. Some carry sheets of cardboard with similar arrangements. Others have large bins filled with myriad pins they’ve received over the years, on sale for cheap.
The room is more crowded than usual — unofficial leader Scott Reed posted a notice of the gathering on Facebook inviting anyone who is attending the Paris Olympics to come.
Credit: Madison Auchincloss
Credit: Madison Auchincloss
Reed hands them official Paris Olympics pins to take with them, and one member offers bags of free pins from the collection of his brother, who passed away last year. As one member said, you don’t want to buy your starter pins in Paris. It’s better to bring them with you.
“The base group here is our normal monthly pin traders,” Reed told Rough Draft. “Probably two-thirds of the people here, I’ve never met before … It’s just nice meeting people who are excited about going.”
Meet the collectors
Reed began collecting pins at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. His employer at the time, NationsBank, was an Olympic sponsor and created pins commemorating their partnership for employees. Reed figured out who was in charge of distributing the pins and asked for some more. He got a bag of 50 and headed down to The Varsity, thinking that nobody would be interested in trading him for such common pins.
“I thought, nobody’s going to want NationsBank pins, they’re so common,” Reed told Rough Draft. “I might have to trade five pins to get one. To my pleasant surprise, I realized people were willing to trade me one pin for one pin. It just kind of snowballed from there.”
It’s a relatively common origin story among the members.
Credit: Madison Auchincloss
Credit: Madison Auchincloss
Sean Stowers worked for UPS during the ‘96 Olympics and received a bag of pins shaped like delivery trucks from his boss, who told him he’d be fired if he sold the pins. But he was allowed to trade them.
Stowers headed down to the Olympic Village with a work friend, where he was immediately offered $100 for one of the pins. Stowers declined, not wanting to lose his job. Instead, he swapped two pins for an Olympic Starter jacket (similar to this one) which the vendor was selling for $150 at the time. His friend Scott, his boss Curtis and Curtis’s wife did the same. The group soon realized they were hungry, so they stopped at a food truck, where the vendor had a small cardboard sheet with some pins on them.
“I said, ‘Hey, if I give you this truck [pin], will you take care of our meal and that family of four behind us?’ " Stowers told Rough Draft at the meeting. “And he was like ‘Yeah!’ "
Stowers ultimately amassed a large collection of UPS pins from the ‘96 Olympics. When the 2000 Sydney Olympics came around, he sold the collection for $3,800 (now around $7,000) to another collector and used the money to fund his stay in Sydney. He’s traveled to every Olympics since. And at most of them, he hasn’t bought his own beer.
“My buddy and I — my buddy who passed away [in 2015], we had a deal that if either of us ever bought a beer at the Olympics, we would have to give the other one $100,” Stowers laughed.
One of the secrets of the pin trading community is how much access you can gain through pin trading. Everyone in the club has a story about getting free food or a hotel room from pin trading. Tickets are a particular commodity, as most Olympic volunteers get free tickets to events but can’t attend many of them, meaning they’re willing to trade pins for the tickets. It requires charm and a good sense of what pins are worth, but it is relatively easy to do if you meet the right people.
Stowers and Reed get more access to the Olympics than most pin collectors. That’s because they design pins for various countries. Reed has designed one country’s pin for this year (he asked not Rough Draft not to disclose the country until the pin has been released), and while Stowers hasn’t designed a pin for these Olympics, he is working with North Macedonia on several projects and has designed pins in the past for Bermuda, Lesotho and Albania among others. His favorite design was for Dominica, which has parrots with moving wings.
“When I started making pins, it was because athletes would come up to me and say ‘You probably don’t want this one, it’s not very nice,’ " Stowers said. “And it broke my heart. This is their moment in time. This [pin] is an extension of them, this is a representation of their team and their country, and they’ve got crap that they’re ashamed of. So I started reaching out to some countries and saying, ‘Hey, let me do something nice for you.’ "
But what Stowers really gets out of designing pins is being put on the list of people able to access the Olympic Village. That’s where he meets athletes and trades with them and makes even more connections. Stowers also gets some copies of the pins to trade.
Country pins are among some of the more valuable pins since they are only given to the athletes. In fact, the prize of Reed’s collection is his completed set of country pins from the 1996 Olympics. Over several years, Reed managed to acquire the athlete pin from every country that competed at those Games. Most serious collectors prioritize one sort of pin — Coca-Cola pins, athlete pins, etc. — and try and find as many of those as they can.
But more than the pins is the community created and friendships made along the way.
“The real fun in collecting the pins is not the pins themselves,” Reed said. “I enjoy looking at them … But it’s not the pin itself insomuch as it is the memories related to the pins, because there was some kind of specific interaction where I got the pins. Particularly if it was a pin I obtained during the Games, there was an interaction with someone else from somewhere else in the world that I met on the street, I talked to them and traded the pin and had a nice, short interaction with them. … I literally have friends from pin trading all over the world, and I can travel anywhere in the world and have somebody that I can let know I’m coming, and I can meet them there and say hello … That social aspect of it, and the memories related to the friends that I’ve made, to me is the best part of pin collecting and the reason that I’m still doing it, versus just taking what I got in Atlanta and stopping there.”
Reed has meetups planned with dozens of people in Paris and plans to meet even more people this time. But before he goes, the pin collectors have one last meeting on July 15 at Manuel’s Tavern. It’s the sendoff meeting for those going to Paris, and Reed is going to bring his Olympic torch from the Atlanta Olympics.
Credit: Rough Draft Atlanta
Credit: Rough Draft Atlanta
MEET OUR PARTNER
Today’s story comes from our partner Rough Draft Atlanta. Rough Draft publishes Reporter Newspapers, community newspapers in Brookhaven, Buckhead, Dunwoody, and Sandy Springs. Visit them online at RoughDraftAtlanta.com or on Instagram @RoughDraftATL.
If you have any feedback or questions about our partnerships, you can contact Senior Manager of Partnerships Nicole Williams via email at nicole.williams@ajc.com.
About the Author
