Teenagers nowadays don’t go for “collecting” embroidered patches. They’d much rather have pins with rock star or movie designs adorning their bags. Personally, I think this is an improvement over the rabbit’s foot keychains they attach to the zippers. Another advantage I see, for kids at least, is that they can change the pins at any time they want. And they’re easy to find.
Embroidered patches are much harder to find, it’s not every magazine shop or hobby shop which carry embroidered patches. Of course, patches have more history than pins. Embroidered patches which you see on sale at the mall are either from old uniforms, or production over-runs, whereas pins are made at the mall kiosk.
Collecting embroidered patches is not much of a hobby, unlike stamp collecting for instance. But like stamps, embroidered patches can be collected according to type. For instance, patches could be from veterans organizations, or military units, or civilian forces like police, firemen’s patches, etc. I don’t see the point of collecting Boy Scout or Girl Scout patches, unless these are old patches from the 1950s.
Typically, one other reasone that collecting patches is not like collecting stamps is because most collectors don’t think of themselves as collectors. They don’t hunt down specific designs. Rather, these buyers find the patches at a hobby shop, find the design interesting and buy them on a whim. The patches end up as patches for bags, jackets, jeans, more like accents or accessories to the clothing. This shouldn’t be a surprise, the patches were designed to be sewn to clothes in the first place.
