About Us

Welcome to myPins.com, the online reference for lapel pin collecting.

The History of myPins.com

In 1995, Dr. Michael J. Miller was looking forward to attending the summer Olympic games in Atlanta, Georgia. As a relatively new Olympic pin collector, Dr. Miller wanted to connect with other pin collectors in order to establish pin trading relationships prior to the start of the 1996 Games. He opened an account with a local Internet service provider and without any prior knowledge of HTML programming, designed a one-page personal website focused on Olympic pin collecting. Dr. Miller included his email address, a description of the types of pins that he was interested in acquiring, and a list of upcoming pin shows that were scheduled to be held in the Atlanta area during that year. His home page was, in fact, one of the very first websites dedicated to Olympic pin collecting.

Two years later, Dr. Miller explored ways in which he could bring together the global pin collecting and trading community, and subsequently proposed the formation of the first USENET newsgroup for this purpose. After six months of developing the newsgroup's charter and rationale, soliciting support from fellow collectors, and a rigorous online voting process, the rec.collecting.pins newsgroup was formally established on August 11, 1997. Since that time, thousands of messages have been posted, linking pin collectors from all over the world.

Due to the overwhelming growth and success of the Internet, hundreds of new pin collecting websites began to appear, and it was necessary to develop an online directory that would catalog these resources. Dr. Miller expanded his website to include a comprehensive list of Olympic, Hard Rock Cafe, Disney and topical pin sites, and more than 15 years after the launch of his one-page website, the number of pin collecting links on myPins.com totals more than 500! We hope that your new pin collecting website can be included in the near future.