HOW BADGE AND MEDAL MAKER BLACKINTON USES AI

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V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 44, 2026, Article 16

We haven't discussed New England badge and medal maker Blackinton before, with just a couple indirect mentions in past issues. -Editor

"Blackinton® is a family-owned company and the largest manufacturer of public safety badges and uniform insignia in the United States. For more than 170 years, we've crafted the badges worn by the nation's leading police, sheriff, fire, security, and government departments, every one made in-house at our Attleboro Falls, Massachusetts factory, the same town where we started in 1852.

Staying in one place this long is no accident. We've watched countless competitors close their doors or move production overseas. We chose to stay, to keep the craft here at home, and to keep improving it. The result is a badge that pairs old-world craftsmanship with modern manufacturing, one built to be worn with pride for an entire career."

There are some references in the Newman Numismatic Portal to club medals made by Blackinton. Have these ever been cataloged? What medals, tokens or other numismatic products have the company made over the years?

I came across Blackinton this week when I saw this article from Anthropic about how Blackinton is using their Claude artificial intelligence tool. Here's an excerpt - see the complete article online. -Editor

Established in 1852, VH Blackinton & Co is a Massachusetts-based manufacturer that handcrafts the badges, medals, and lapel pins worn by police, fire, EMS, and corrections officers across the country. Blackinton employs about 200 people, and is moving into its third generation with the Roque family who bought it in 1974. Today, they're using Claude to help build tools that keep their business on track without changing the craft behind their process.

Between 8,000 and 12,000 orders sit on Blackinton's factory floor at a given time—each one custom-made and personalized. While a responder's pants, boots, and belts get replaced as they wear out, badges are designed to last for an entire career. They get pinned onto uniforms and worn for decades; some come back thirty years later to be embedded in acrylic as a retirement gift an officer can pass down. Blackinton also makes badges for causes the community wants to support, like the Firefighter Cancer Support Network, which helps firefighters and their families through a cancer diagnosis. "It's very much an old-world process," says Dave Elliott, the director of sales. "The polishing and enameling and plating, these aren't skills that are churning out of trade schools."

Andrew Roque, whose grandfather bought Blackinton and whose father is CEO, started at the company at 16 and now supports HR and international sales. "It's a balancing act," he says of modernizing a business this old. "You can check something out, you can try something…it doesn't mean you have to let go of what you've been doing."

Two years ago, though, that balancing act was growing unsteady. Blackinton's lead times had stretched to six to ten weeks—even up to fourteen in some cases. The dealer network that sells to municipal agencies had started calling the company slow: about $2.7 million in orders were stuck in production.

Part of the problem sat within the factory's infrastructure. Blackinton's operations run on a 40-year-old system built on Cobol, a programming language from the 1950s. It creates orders and stores records, but was never designed to explain what was happening on the floor, making it difficult for employees to access the information they needed. Around COVID, a wave of retirements compounded the problem, taking institutional knowledge with it. "We lost over 300 years of experience across these eight people that retired," Dave says. "A long-term vision would be to have systems so that the fidelity of the information persists through time in ways that will be so much more powerful decades to come."

Hiring Edgar Soto, a production planning manager, was a step toward that vision. Edgar came in to think about sequencing across departments, and has built new planning and reporting tools on top of the Cobol system with Claude—turning what used to depend on institutional knowledge into something the whole floor can see. Tablet-based applications are now stationed around the factory, and every morning they push a prioritization list to each department, so the whole floor is working on the right orders to achieve the same delivery dates.

Beyond the factory-wide tools, Edgar also uses Claude to solve new problems as he comes across them. One afternoon, working with the marketing team to catalog a paper book full of design case cutouts, he stopped and asked himself why he wasn't just building an application for that. So he did, with Claude.

The team now uses Claude to track events like department and city anniversaries that create sales opportunities, manage the roughly 200 open projects each business development manager carries, and turn data into reporting views they can put directly in front of dealers.

Of the roughly 200 people Blackinton employs, about 150 work the factory floor. Every badge is still hand-polished, hand-enameled, engraved, and lacquered. Steel dies get pressed into raw brass four or five times to bring up the detail, with a stop between presses in an oven at 1,600 degrees to soften the metal. "The people who make the badges are the most important people we have," Dave says.

What has changed is upstream of the floor, in the sales office and in planning, where a small team is now building the kind of tools it used to have to do without.