Vintage New Kids on the Block Pin 🎤 Jordan Knight Jazz Hands Button, NOS 1989 Big Step Productions

Who Didn't Have Those "Jazz Hands" Taped Up Somewhere in 1989? 🙋‍♀️

If you came of age anywhere near a Tiger Beat centerfold, a roller rink, or a boombox in the late 1980s, you know this pose before you even look twice — arms thrown straight up, palms out, that just-caught-mid-dance-move grin. Buttons like this one were the currency of teenage devotion. Pinned to a jean jacket, a backpack strap, or a corkboard next to torn-out magazine pages, a pin like this wasn't decoration — it was a public declaration. You were a true believer before your friends even had the lyrics to "Hangin' Tough" memorized.

This is a vintage New Kids on the Block pin-back button, officially licensed in 1989 — confirmed by the copyright line printed right on the piece itself, ©1989 BIG STEP PRODUCTIONS, INC. — and manufactured by the Button-Up Company of Troy, Michigan, whose full imprint (BUTTON-UP 2011 AUSTIN TROY, MI 48083) circles the curl of the button.

It measures 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) across, and it survives today as genuine New Old Stock (NOS) — inventory that never made it onto a jean jacket or into a fan-club mailer, sitting unsold since the band's original heyday and never worn a single day since it left the press. The artwork is four-color halftone photo-offset lithography sealed under a glossy protective coating, the exact method period button-makers used to turn a photograph into mass-produced tin — up close, the reds and flesh tones resolve into the fine dot pattern that was the signature of the process, not a flaw but the fingerprint of how these were actually made.

The design shows a young New Kid, dark-haired, mid-wave with both hands raised, dressed in a navy blazer over a crisp white turtleneck, set against a warm cream ground with "NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK" stamped across the lower third in bold, blocky red lettering. No member's name is printed on the button itself, but the pose and the styling match the collector-recognized "jazz hands" portrait widely attributed to Jordan Knight, the group's falsetto-voiced frontman.

🖨️ The Maker: Button-Up Co. of Troy, Michigan

Button-Up is real, it was licensed, and it printed at real scale — and yet it's one of those small regional novelty houses that left almost no paper trail beyond the very buttons it made. Federal trademark filings put the company on record as early as April 1984, registering names like COMIC RELEASE, RERUN REVIEW, and JAMMIN for "novelty items, namely ornamental buttons," and later AMERICAN BITCH for buttons and key chains in 1988. That tells us something important: Button-Up wasn't just a job printer running whatever crossed the counter — it was building and branding its own novelty button lines through the mid-to-late 1980s, the same years pin-back culture exploded in shopping malls and record stores across the country.

Surviving examples bearing the Button-Up/Troy, MI imprint span both ends of the novelty spectrum — generic humor buttons on one side, and heavyweight entertainment licenses on the other, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles carded pins and Bon Jovi buttons from the *Slippery When Wet* era. That range suggests a shop plugged directly into the licensing pipelines of the decade's biggest pop culture properties, cranking out wearable fandom by the thousands for teenagers who wanted the whole world to know exactly who they loved.

The address on the curl — 2011 Austin Drive — sits in the light-industrial corridor of southeast Troy, off Rochester Road near I-75, a stretch of flex and warehouse units that has housed small manufacturers for decades. Beyond the imprint on its own products, Button-Up left remarkably little behind: no known founding story, no roster of names, no account of when or why the presses eventually went quiet. That gap is itself worth sitting with — this little button may be one of the more complete surviving records of a company that otherwise exists almost nowhere else.

🏢 Big Step Productions & the Empire Behind Every Blockhead's Jacket

Buttons like this one didn't land at the mall by accident — they were part of a deliberately built empire, and Big Step Productions, Inc. was the company running it. Big Step was the New Kids' own production and merchandising vehicle, a documented New York corporation that shows up in federal court records of the era standing right alongside the band members and their management team. Discogs credits Big Step as the production company behind the group's *Step by Step* album, with longtime manager Dick Scott as executive producer, and the company is also listed as co-producer of the 1990 Saturday-morning NKOTB animated series.

Buttons weren't an afterthought bolted onto that machine — they were a named, protected product line. When Big Step Productions filed federal trademark applications in May 1990, the goods listed, word for word, included "ornamental buttons and pins, oversized novelty buttons, freestanding novelty picture buttons" right alongside pillows, locker mirrors, six-foot photo standups, and sleeping bags. Separate court filings from the same period record that The Winterland Company held the exclusive license for New Kids tour and retail merchandising — the licensing architecture that a regional print shop like Button-Up would have been operating inside when it pressed a run of buttons like this one.

The scale of it all is almost hard to picture in hindsight. Industry retrospectives peg the entire New Kids licensed merchandise line — dolls, lunchboxes, apparel, bed sheets, buttons — at roughly $400 million in a single year at its peak, and in 1991 the group was reported by Forbes as the highest-paid entertainers in America, with earnings around $115 million. A quarter or a dollar pin sold at a concert table or a five-and-dime rack was one tiny transaction inside a genuinely massive commercial machine — which is exactly why so few of them survived unused the way this one did.

⚖️ The Lawsuit That Made Legal History

Here's the part of this button's paper trail that reaches well beyond pop music. Big Step Productions, alongside the band and its management, was a named plaintiff in New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing — a case that began in a California federal district court in 1990 and was decided on appeal by the Ninth Circuit in 1992. The band sued newspapers running 900-number "vote for your favorite New Kid" popularity polls, arguing the papers were profiting off the group's trademarked name without permission.

The band lost, and lost in a way that changed trademark law for good. Judge Alex Kozinski's opinion created what's now taught in law schools as the doctrine of nominative fair use — the principle that you're allowed to use someone else's trademark to refer to them, as long as you're not implying their endorsement. It remains one of the most cited trademark opinions in American law, and it exists because five teenagers from Boston got so big, so fast, that even naming them in a newspaper poll became a legal question. A separate 1991 federal case, over merchandising licensing rights, further documents just how tightly controlled — and how contested — that empire had become by the time buttons like this one were rolling off Michigan presses.

📅 1989: The Year Hangin' Tough Took Over

The ©1989 date on this button isn't a vague nod to "the vintage era" — it lands squarely inside the exact year the New Kids went from a regional Boston act to the biggest pop phenomenon in the country. Their album *Hangin' Tough* was a famously slow burn, taking a documented 55 weeks to climb to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — one of the longest climbs to the top spot in chart history. On September 9, 1989, the album and its title track simultaneously topped the Billboard 200 and the Hot 100, on the heels of hit singles "Please Don't Go Girl," "You Got It (The Right Stuff)," and the group's first No. 1, "I'll Be Loving You (Forever)." *Hangin' Tough* went on to be certified 8x Platinum and finished as the second-best-selling album in America for 1989, trailing only Bobby Brown's *Don't Be Cruel*. A licensed button dated to that exact year is a small, honest artifact of the precise months this band went supernova.

🙋 The Face on the Button

No name is printed anywhere on this piece, so the identification has to be stated honestly: the raised-arms, jazz-hands pose and the navy blazer over a white turtleneck match the portrait that collectors have long recognized as Jordan Knight, the group's lead vocalist. Jordan Nathaniel Marcel Knight was born May 17, 1970, and grew up in the Boston area, developing a falsetto singing style influenced by 1970s soul group The Stylistics. He and his brother Jonathan reportedly went to their fateful audition for manager Maurice Starr in the summer of 1984 without even telling their mother beforehand — and were brought into the group almost immediately. Within five years, that Boston kid was on a mass-produced button in Michigan, pinned to jean jackets from coast to coast.

🏙️ Troy, Michigan: An Unlikely Home for Teen Pop Merchandise

Troy sits in Oakland County, part of the greater Detroit metro area, and by the 1980s it had grown into a busy hub of light industry, corporate offices, and retail — the kind of place with flex-space warehouses and print shops tucked in among the office parks, feeding both the auto industry's endless demand for suppliers and the retail world's endless demand for novelty goods. It's not the city most fans would guess sat behind their favorite pin-back button, and that's exactly what makes the story worth telling: while the New Kids themselves were selling out arenas from Boston, a small novelty printer in a Detroit suburb was quietly running the presses that put their faces on millions of jean jackets nationwide.

💫 Why This Little Button Still Matters

Pieces like this one are small, but they're honest survivors of a genuinely massive moment in American pop culture — a licensing empire big enough to reshape trademark law, a chart run big enough to make five Boston kids the highest-paid entertainers in the country, and a printing company in Michigan whose whole documented history survives mostly on the backs of the very buttons it made. An unused, unworn example carries all of that history without a single mile on it — the same little piece of tin that decorated a million bedroom corkboards in 1989, never having left the box.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 📌 Pin it to a cork board or memory board alongside concert tickets, cassette inserts, or magazine clippings from the era
• 🖼️ Set it in a small shadow box or riker mount alongside other NKOTB or 1980s pop memorabilia for a wall grouping
• 👜 Clip it onto a denim jacket lapel or backpack strap the way it was originally meant to be worn
• 🎀 Group several licensed 1980s band buttons together in a display case as a snapshot of teen bedroom culture
• 🎁 Gift it to a lifelong Blockhead as a nostalgic keepsake tied to the exact year the band broke wide open
• 📚 Tuck it into a scrapbook or keepsake box devoted to 1980s pop music and teen fandom

🎁 Who Collects These

New Kids on the Block pins draw a wonderfully specific crowd: the original Blockheads who wore the real thing the first time around and are hunting down the exact pieces of their teenage identity; 1980s pop culture and boy-band collectors building out a broader wall of the era's biggest teen phenomena; button and pin-back specialists who chase officially licensed, maker-marked examples over unmarked bootlegs; and music-merchandising historians drawn to the Big Step Productions story and the trademark case it produced. Anyone furnishing a nostalgia-themed room, a vintage pop-culture display, or simply looking to hand a genuine piece of 1989 to someone who lived it the first time will find a natural home for this one.

❓ FAQ

Is this an officially licensed New Kids on the Block button?
Yes. The curl carries the copyright line ©1989 BIG STEP PRODUCTIONS, INC. — the band's own licensed merchandising company — along with the manufacturer's imprint for the Button-Up Company of Troy, Michigan.

Which band member is pictured?
No name appears on the button itself, but the pose and styling are widely recognized among collectors as Jordan Knight's signature "jazz hands" wave.

What size is the button?
It measures 1.5 inches (about 3.8 cm) in diameter, the classic size for wearable fan pins of the era.

What does "New Old Stock" mean here?
It means this button was produced during the band's original run and never sold, worn, or distributed — it has sat in inventory since 1989 rather than being a later reissue.

How was the artwork produced?
It was printed using four-color halftone photo-offset lithography, the standard commercial method for turning a photograph into a mass-produced button in this period, finished with a glossy protective coating.

Why does the maker's name matter so much here?
Button-Up Company left very little documented history behind — the imprint on pieces like this one is one of the few surviving records that the company ever existed, which makes each marked example a small piece of preserved local business history.

Is Big Step Productions connected to anything beyond merchandising?
Yes — Big Step Productions was a named party in the landmark 1990s federal trademark case that established the "nominative fair use" doctrine still cited in trademark law today.