What Types of Keychains are Customizable?

Are Custom Keychains Still Popular?

Even though marketing has changed a lot, custom keychains are still a great way for any brand to promote themselves. Getting a keychain made just for you and can be used daily feels special. It makes life a bit easier, and having all your important keys in one place makes you feel safer.

Types of Keychains

1. PVC Keychains

A PVC keychain is made from Polyvinyl Chloride, a durable, flexible rubber-like plastic material, and is a great alternative to your stand hard plastic or metal keychains. Their compact size and tough construction make them ideal for attaching to keys, backpacks, or bags. PVC keychains offer a practical and cost-effective way for businesses to promote their brand or message. Their vibrant colors and intricate designs can enhance visibility and recognition, making them a valuable marketing tool.

Printed Back

We can print text information onto the back of your PVC keychains. This is great for those who want to add business contacts, such as a name or phone number. We can also add QR codes if you want to link to your website or other information with ease immediately. Because QR codes aren’t readable, we highly recommend printing the code instead if you try to make them out of molded PVC.

2D or 3D PVC

If you have a design that you want to make pop out, we can make the PVC keychain using a 3D mold rather than 2D. While more expensive, 3D PVC creates a cool extra effect that makes your design look alive. However, we would push you towards 2D if your design has much detail or text since 2D PVC can handle smaller detailing much better than 3D in this PVC video

One or Two Sided

Our default way of producing keychains will always be one-sided. However, if you want to make a design that makes sense whichever way the keychain faces, we can make your PVC keychain two-sided. We can even make a separate design on the backside. 

2. Leather Keychains

Like PVC, Leather is malleable but not fragile, making it a great keychain for those who fiddle with everything they own. Leather is smooth to the touch and promotes a sense of quality and class. The more leather is played with, the softer it becomes, so it only gets better the more you use it.

Dyed Leather

Leather isn’t limited to the natural browns that we’re familiar with. If you are looking for a truly unique spin, we can dye the leather to almost any Pantone color you can choose from. You can imagine green, red, yellow, blue, and anything else! 

Color Fill

What if you decide to use a darker color for your leather keychain but want to be sure that the design still shows clearly? We can add painted color fills into the debossed logo on your keychains! It creates a great additional flare for your custom keychains, especially for color combinations that complement each other, like black leather and white. If you want to keep a lighter leather color and make the design darker, we can fill the debossed design and even add multiple colors.

Folded Loop

Your custom keychains don’t have to be just one piece of flat leather. We also create thin strips of leather and fold them over, creating a looped keychain. We can add designs on both sides of the loop as well, so you can place designs that show no matter which way the keychain is facing. Because the leather has to be narrower to produce the longer loop, we urge you to limit designs to simple text or a small logo.

Metal Emblem Attachment

The most unique addition we can use for these keychains is attaching a metal emblem on the leather. This gives an extra level of class to your design, as we associate the combination of two different materials with significantly more value. The emblem can either be stable or attached near the top of the keychain and not the bottom so that it can move freely as the keychain moves.

3. Metal Keychains

Metal keychains are the style most commonly associated with high quality. We start with a base metal like iron, bronze, or zinc alloy and can change the plating of your keychains to best suit your design. The usual shapes are like rectangles and circles, but we can also die-cut the keychain directly to your logo’s shape. We recommend die-cutting if you want to produce unique, one-of-a-kind keychains.

3D Raised Metal

Similar to PVC, we can go the extra mile and make the metal take on a three-dimensional raised shape to make your logo pop. Three-dimensional metal is great for designs that have animals or people in them. However, we recommend you lean towards more antique plating rather than shiny to see all the raised details.

Two-Sided

As with our previous keychains, you can create a two-sided keychain with the same design or a completely different mold on the back instead. We often see this used for adding information like a phone number or email address onto the back of a keychain, but you could also place something like the year the keychain was received if you produce and use the keychains for an annual event. It can entice people to come back and collect each different keychain every year.

Extra Attachments

You’re not limited to a single attachment for keychains. We have done several projects with clients involving each keychain being a set with multiple attachments. It can make each keychain feel like a one-of-a-kind since it’s so rare to see different designs all on one loop.

How to Choose Your Custom Keychain

Consider Your Design

Each type of keychain can affect what we are able to keep of your design. While we can do plenty of detail, sometimes it’s just the amount of space we have on the keychain and how much the material base of your keychain we can afford to cut into. Leather is a wonderful choice for texture but doesn’t leave as much room for color unless you can afford to add it. Metal and PVC are far more forgiving with color but still have detail limitations regarding incredibly small things.

Consider Your Budget

We want you to be sure you can afford each keychain addition’s bells and whistles. While something like changing the plating of a metal keychain can affect the price per keychain by a few cents at most, each small or large change can be drastic on the final price point. While we can update your quote for each process step, we recommend you know your top budget spending. Then, we can let you know what we can or cannot do based on what you can afford to accomplish.