I am a secondary school English teacher in Wiltshire, England (although I am originally from Penarth in South Wales). Just before the first Covid lockdown in 2021, our school had speaker called Jude in to talk to the pupils about gender diversity; they mentioned some companies having a bowl of pronoun badges on their reception area for people to pick up as they entered. This inspired the kids to request something similar; a request that soon included pride badges, gay icon badges and generally anything that featured a rainbow.
With school budgets being tighter than an Olympic sprinter's Spandex, I decided to buy a cheap badge maker online and give it a go myself. The first batch were rubbish - the pins didn't line up and I'd clearly got the font size wrong. But then along came Covid and I found myself holed up in my house teaching my pupils through a screen (I'm still not sure how many of them were really listening and how many were watching Tiger King!), but, on the bright side, it gave me a chance to perfect my badge making skills.
Thinking there might be more Pride groups in my position, I decided to put my pronoun and pride badges onto Etsy.
24 hours later, I had my first sale to a health centre in Toronto, Canada. And Pride and Pronouns was born.
I am still a teacher part-time, but spend most of my weekends making and packaging badges from my garden office, occasionally assisted by my wife whose main role is to provide the snacks.