Sounding Like a Broken Record?
Posted in Patch Collecting by John E. Pannell on September 19th, 2007 at 10:57 pm At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll jump on my soapbox again about special awards and fake patches. If you want to give a special award to one or some of your lodge brothers, please take my advice and don’t make it a patch!
I was recently writing to a friend of mine in another lodge about an ongoing problem they have had with a certain award’s patch. The lodge leadership created an award scheme for brothers who made a very significant service commitment to one aspect of the lodge’s program. They were to be awarded a special jacket patch upon completion of the requirements. After a couple of years, very few brothers had earned the award but the patches started to show up on eBay in quantity. This is a very familiar story. The manufacturer had used an overseas subcontractor and additional supplies made their way into the collectorate. This shouldn’t surprise anyone anymore.
The lodge disposed of all their supply of the patches and had them made again by a different company. The lodge has used this second company for a few years now without problem, until very recently. Within the past couple of weeks one of these new patches, with the manufacturer’s sticker embedded in the plastic backing, was purchased at a TOR. The lodge has yet to give out any of the new patches, and were not happy they had apparently been hit by the Asian patch market again. That’s where the story ends for now.
I am deliberately leaving out my friend’s name, the type of award, and what lodge is giving it as well as the companies involved. Ultimately none of these are that important. A large amount of patches are now made in overseas factories, in countries where many do not have our understanding of copyright law or business ethics. They are not Scouters. They see nothing wrong with copying a design or making extra quantities for sale directly to collectors and dealers here in the US. My intent here is not to dwell on the ethics of this.
If you want to award a lodge brother for a special achievement, don’t give him a simple patch. Take the lead from the various other awards and honors given in the OA in recent years*. The Vigil Honor is signified by a special sash and a triangular pin. The Founders Award is a medallion and pocket ribbon. The Distinguished Service award is a medallion suspended from a ribbon, worn around the neck (though there is also a square knot patch). The various service awards of recent years have been in the forms of pocket ribbons and pins. None are primarily in the form of a patch.
Please, if you want the award to be personally significant to the recipient then don’t give him a patch, especially a cheap one. Though it may sound like some form of sacrilege here, a patch is just a piece of cloth. Make the award special. Be creative. Make it match the achievment. In my opinion, in doing so not only do you honor the recipient in a more significant way, but you also avoid the problems and hassles of that award patch later coming on the collecting scene from alternate sources.
* Someone would surely remind me of the 50th and 60th anniversary awards, the only two patches authorized to be worn on the OA sash. With apologizes to the older brothers reading this, but I don’t consider 1965 and 1975 to be “recent” years. These are the exceptions that prove the rule, so to speak.
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