Nerd Merit Badges
Back in 2008 I was working on a site for Bauer Publishing and ended up contributing a little bit to some open source project. I was so proud of myself and felt like I deserved a merit badge.
My friend John Young and I started riffing on it and ended up forming Nerd Merit Badges and selling 1000s of 1.5” embroidered badges for nerdy things.
Some examples:
- Contributed to Open Source – this was right when GitHub was formed so naturally we used the Octocat
- Printer Hero – for the person in the office who always rises to the challenge of fixing the printer
- Inbox Zero – for the person who always works their inbox to zero like Merlin Mann 😉
- Bought this Bitcoin Badge with a Bitcoin, Badge – for the person who could figure out how to send us a Bitcoin back when they were worth $5 each. We sold about 200 of them... if only we had kept those Bitcoin.
This is another project that really opened doors for me. I'd see them all over the place at conferences, offices, and even Chris Wanstrath, one of the founders of GitHub, sewed it to the lapel of the jacket he wore on stage when giving keynotes.
Some of the badges we created:
