Decades ago, with only $200 to her name and a fistful of moxie, Cindy Bergler exhibited at the SAAGNY show in upstate New York. This wasn’t make or break – she was already broke. Stray voltage had struck her Minnesota dairy farm, forcing her, her husband and their kids to move into her mother-in-law’s basement. After a conflict with her employer, she set out to make it on her own. The only thing she took with her was knowledge of how to make promotional buttons.

“All of my competitors were guys who told me I wouldn’t make it,” Bergler says. “They wouldn’t take me seriously. Back then, women weren’t really supposed to travel by themselves, either. They’d ask where my husband is. I told them, ‘Well, we have kids at home and I have to go sell.’”

Thirty years later, Bergler has proven the doubters wrong. Express-A-Button (asi/53408) has been a perennial winner in the Distributor Choice Awards’ “Buttons” category. Bergler’s firm moved from the basement to a state-of-the-art facility, currently employing 55 local workers, as well as three of her children.

She’s also expanded her product line through several acquisitions. Her most recent purchase came in August of 2016, acquiring longtime industry supplier SAMCO (asi/84820). “I knew it would be a great opportunity,” Bergler says. “I knew what that name meant in the industry.”

Before she received the call from SAMCO, she was considering a major change of her own: retirement. “Recently, I lost my dad, and I have an extremely sick husband. Life is short and I’ve worked hard,” Bergler says.

The SAMCO opportunity pushed aside those retirement plans as Bergler realized the potential impact on her employees and local community. As she’s always done, she went with her gut.

“We have loyal distributors, and our product is something that isn’t going away,” Bergler says. “I like the challenges of bigger orders and doing things I’m not supposed to do.”

Her biggest order came almost a decade ago when a distributor asked if she could make five to eight million buttons. She said yes, and a week later, pulled off to the side of the road when learning her company landed an account with Disney World. “We do all of the park buttons for first timers, graduates, birthdays. This was a big one,” Bergler says.

After a few years with the account, she took any employees who wanted to go to Disney World to celebrate and admire their hard work. Some flew on an airplane for the first time, and one 60-year-old employee rode her first roller coaster. It was clearly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“She screamed a lot,” Bergler says with a laugh.