About TravelPinHunt

TravelPinHunt is a community-built database of places where you can buy travel pins around the world.

The idea came from a simple problem: if you are collecting pins while travelling, it's hard to know where to find and buy a quality pin (or any pin really) to add to your collection when you visit a new city - so you have to visit many gift shops and try to find a place which sells pins, which can be especially challenging in not very popular destinations.

The goal of TravelPinHunt is to solve this problem by firstly adding locations where author bought pins himself as a foundation, and then crowd-sourcing pin locations from fellow collectors, who can submit them to be added to the main database via a special form.

Functionality

Use the search bar to find a city you're interested in, and the website will show you known locations where you can buy a pin for your collection. On the home page you can also click on a country and then pick a city with pin-selling locations. Locations are usually gift or souvenir shops (but not always). They always include info about the place and what kind of pins you can buy there, plus helpful details and sometimes photos of the pins sold - and most importantly, always a direct link to Google Maps so you can easily find the place to buy your next pin. Locations are tied to a specific city, which is tied to a country, but in the case of the USA the hierarchy also includes states.

Scope

This website is about travel and tourism pins only. TravelPinHunt is not focused on other pin topics, specific manufacturers or networks of shops - so, for example, locations which only sell Disney pins or Hard Rock pins (which all are quite popular in their own way) will not be added to the database.
Locations which only sell generic pins or pins which are clearly not travel related (not about the country, city or a specific location there) are not added to the database either.

This service is made by a single developer Dmitrii. I work in IT as a data engineer (add me on LinkedIn), but then I'm also a relatively experienced traveller (~80 countries) and enthusiastic travel pin collector (200+ travel pins) - so I develop and maintain TravelPinHunt as a thing I wanted to exist to help with my pin collecting hobby, and I hope it will be of use to others.

Feel free to check out my Youtube channel Vagabondity Walks, where I make city walk videos covering many places I visit around the world!