So he set about, on his own for several months, working out of the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street in NYC, meeting contractors who created the steel dies needed to produce the blazer buttons, and the enamelists and platers, and then the merchants who bought the buttons. In several months I joined him and within two years, we achieved a milestone in the esoteric world of button making, when we were awarded a contract to produce 350,000 sets of Blazer Buttons as commemorative gifts for the 1980 Ronald Reagan Presidential Inaugural Ball. Mrs. Reagan had sought the company out after a receiving a set of blazer buttons produced by the company for the Republican party a year earlier. The contract was competitively bid against both Tiffany & Co. and Cartier, but Ben Silver was successful. It was an adventure to execute the job. The contract was awarded in November, and Inauguration was, of course, in January. Could we strike thousands of buttons? How much gold would we need? How would we get it to the factory (Bob carried it on the subway!). Were there workers willing to work through the holidays? (Lots of incentives.) Was there packaging for the sets? (More incentives.) Who would package the sets? (We hired the town’s entire high school student body and sat them in our home.) Was there transportation to get them to Washington? (Our UPS driver drove a U Haul). Bob’s determination made it happen which was why both Tiffany and Cartier could not compete. Ben Silver was now on the map. Organizations came knocking, especially established clubs and major corporations. The company was growing.

College crested blazer buttons…what was the market? How could it be expanded? We added a series of newly designed motifs for sports – tennis, golf – as well as Americana designs, working with a newly hired graphic design team. Still department stores buried the buttons, now in elegant velvet boxes instead of their original plastic cases, and only offered them to customers when they purchased a blazer. We then moved the company from wholesale into direct retail sales with our first mail order catalog which became the vehicle for expansion. We learned about the catalog business, about mailing lists, about paper, print, postage, photography, design.

Still, further expansion was required – after all we had a growing family. Off to England to meet with manufacturers of uniform buttons who had the Warrants for the Crown, converting uniform buttons with traditional crests into gold plated blazer buttons.