Vograce Custom Acrylic Binder Clips
Rating: ★★★★☆
Create custom acrylic binder clips on Vograce
One big, recurring theme in my life is that I pick up new hobbies all the time. While there may be one overarching theme (ie. it falls under the “creative” umbrella), I never stick to one particular medium. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at creating physical products, but never really knew where to start. I want to make things that are practical and be utilized every day by the people I love.
Vograce has been on my radar for a while now. They’re a professional manufacturer that specializes in custom acrylic/wood keychains, all kinds of stickers, badges, metal pins, Washi tapes, and more. I’ve seen them used by convention artists on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Unfortunately, I don’t have a daily need for keychains, stickers, Washi tapes, and everything else that they sell haha.
I was trying to figure out what to do as a Christmas present and came across their new “Custom acrylic binder clips” product that debuted in November 2022. In a paperless, digital world, my family, friends, and I don’t use binder clips, BUT I thought to myself… what if they were to be used for something aside from clipping papers?
What if I used them to clip chip bags closed? ?
Seeing this as a great opportunity to try something new, I immediately started running with the idea.
The first part was designing and making the art. I opened Procreate and set my canvas dimensions to 2.5″ x 2.5″, 300 DPI, and CMYK. Vograce provides a variety of different sizes, ranging from 1″ to 4″. I decided to go somewhere in the middle with the 2.5″ x 2.5″.
The art itself took about ~1-1.5hrs to complete, from start to finish. I exported it into a PNG, thickened the outline in Photoshop, and then took a look at the Vograce instructions.
Quantity: ★★★★★
One of the biggest draws to Vograce is their low minimum order quantity (MOQ). For some of their products, you only need to purchase one (1). With their acrylic binder clips, there’s a MOQ of three (3). Once you purchase more than five (5) binder clips, however, you start seeing discounts.
As this was an entirely new endeavor for me (I’d never used a manufacturer before and there were no reviews for the binder clips as it was a new product), I really liked the fact that I could do a low MOQ. Because I wanted to make this a low risk investment, I opted to go for five (5) binder clips.
Communication: ★★★★★
I didn’t directly communicate with the Vograce staff while making this product as I found the binder clip page to be pretty self-explanatory. When I submitted my order on November 29, 2022, I received my artwork proof by December 2, 2022.
This was a turnaround time of 4 days – pretty quick, considering they’re not based in the United States!
Cost & Shipping: ★★★★★
The cost of the five (5) binder clips was reasonable and affordable. With the discount, the total was around $11.05. Vograce offers three levels of shipping:
- Economy: Transit time 15-30 days
- Standard: Transit time 10-20 days
- Fast: Transit time 4-12 days
As I had a LITTLE bit of wiggle room, I opted to go for the Standard shipping, which cost $10.82. My grand total was $21.87 USD. It’s a little nutty that the shipping cost as much as the binder clips themselves, so if you are planning to purchase from Vograce, I highly recommend that you bundle as much of your items as possible.
I had a few other binder clip designs I wanted to bring to production, but I knew I wouldn’t have them ready in time to meet the holiday deadline. So… I bit the bullet and considered it to be a $10 guinea pig fee.
From the time I approved my proof on December 2, 2022, the production time took about five (5) days. I received the shipping confirmation on December 7, 2022, and received my items on December 13, 2022.
The process took about 11 business days from start to finish. It was much faster than I thought it would be!
Quality & Functionality: ★★★☆☆
I received the binder clips on December 13, 2022. I forgot to take photos of the packaging, but they did arrive in bubble wrap and were individually wrapped. When I opened the package, the binder clips looked great. There was a thin layer of film that you need to remove when you receive these binder clips, so make sure that you do that!
The clips were stunning in person. The colors looked exactly like how I designed them and I didn’t see any sort of printer error at all.
One of my only gripes were the edges. After I removed the film, the edges of the binder clips still had some rough edges. They were NOT smooth. I had to sand them down to get them the way they appeared on the Vograce website. I don’t know if this had to do with how I ordered it (going with standard shipping instead of the slower version), but this was a little disappointing.
My other gripe was that the binder clips aren’t entirely functional. The clip clamps very weakly, which meant that I could only close bags that didn’t have much thickness to it. It was a huge bummer and I genuinely don’t know how well these would do even clipping paper.
Overall, I would definitely recommend using Vograce as a manufacturer. The process was easy, straightforward, and the turnaround was incredibly quick.
If I could do something differently, I might try to make the binder clips smaller – maybe 1″ x 1″ or 1.5″ x 1.5″. The clamp for the clips does not fluctuate in size, so I think the size of the design also impacted the functionality of it. Either way, I’m glad that I tried it!
