Vintage New Kids on the Block Earrings 🎤 NKOTB Dangle Charms, Green Button-Up Jewelry Card, Boy Band Collectible

navy, hanging from a silver-tone fishhook wire off a small coiled loop. The card itself is glossy black, "Button-Up" written across the top in gold foil script. Nothing on the card prints a date. Between the styling and what the company's own paper trail shows, this is a late-1980s-into-early-1990s piece, right in the thick of the band's biggest run. 🏷️ Button-Up of Troy, Michigan The card is branded Button-Up rather than a New Kids on the Block house mark, and that's not a gap in the story — it's the maker's actual name. A Button-Up New Kids lapel pin spells the rest out on its rim: "Button-Up.. Troy, MI," alongside a 1989 copyright line for Big Step Productions. So Button-Up was a novelty jewelry house out of Troy, in Michigan's Oakland County, working under license from Big Step — the band's own production and licensing company, the same one credited on their "Step by Step" album. Big Step was also behind the band's Saturday-morning cartoon with DIC, which ran on ABC in the fall of 1990 with the guys themselves popping up in live-action clips. Lunch boxes, buttons, T-shirts, Harvey comic books and dolls all poured out of that same licensing boom, and Button-Up's pins and earrings were right in the middle of it. Troy also happened to be home to Kmart's corporate headquarters starting in 1972, so this little card came out of a corporate corner of the Detroit suburbs, not a garage operation. 🎬 Five Kids From Dorchester Before they were New Kids on the Block, they were Nynuk. Maurice Starr grew up in DeLand, Florida, moved to Boston in the early 1970s and had already built New Edition, and in 1984 he and his business partner Mary Alford set out to build a white counterpart to that group. He made no secret of the thinking behind it, either: "I honestly believe that if they'd been white, [New Edition] would have been 20 times as big," he told Entertainment Weekly. They put it together in Dorchester, Boston's biggest neighborhood. Fifteen-year-old Donnie Wahlberg was the first one in, on the strength of his rapping, and the five who stuck were Donnie, Danny Wood, brothers Jonathan and Jordan Knight, and Joey McIntyre. When Columbia Records signed them, the label wanted a new name, so they took it from a rap song Donnie had written and arranged for their first album. Joey McIntyre — the youngest of the five — was recruited by Starr at just twelve. Donnie's younger brother Mark was part of the lineup for a few months early on before he left. That first, self-titled album barely made a ripple until their cover of the Delfonics' "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)" climbed to No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it was 1988's "Hangin' Tough" that turned them into the biggest thing in music. It went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, it was eight times platinum by the end of 1989, and they were the first teen act ever to pull five top-ten hits off one album. Back home, Governor Michael Dukakis declared April 24, 1989, New Kids on the Block Day in Massachusetts. Bryant Gumbel told TODAY viewers in 1989 that nobody had stirred up that kind of hysteria in teenage girls since the Beatles, and I don't think he was exaggerating. By 1990 they were filling stadiums on the Magic Summer Tour, with more than one night at Foxboro Stadium back home in Massachusetts, and they grossed about $74 million on the road that year, more than any other touring act in America. Remember when one boy band was so big they had their own 900-number hotline? Theirs, 1-900-909-5KIDS, was fielding something like 100,000 calls a week at the height of it, and in 1991 Forbes ranked them the single highest-paid entertainers in the country, ahead of Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince and Bill Cosby — merchandise sales that year alone were estimated at $400 million. That hotline even landed in the law books: when USA Today and Star magazine ran their own 900-number polls about the band, the New Kids sued along with Big Step and their merchandise company, Winterland Concessions, and in 1992 the Ninth Circuit sided with the papers. Lawyers still cite New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing as the case behind the "nominative fair use" rule. A young Jennifer Lopez danced as a backup dancer behind them at the 1991 American Music Awards, the same performance where the group rebranded itself "NKOTB." In January 1992, with the Milli Vanilli scandal still fresh, a former associate producer named Gregory McPherson claimed they lip-synched their live shows. They interrupted the Australian leg of their tour to fly to Los Angeles and answer it on The Arsenio Hall Show, and McPherson later took it back, saying they did sing lead on their vocals. They split in 1994, reunited in 2008, and in 2022 released "Bring Back the Time" with Salt-N-Pepa, Rick Astley and En Vogue — proof the devotion never really left, it just went quiet for a while. They're the band usually credited with paving the way for Take That, the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, too. 💚 Still On the Card These never got worn — they've sat on their Button-Up card since the band's original run, a small, bright piece of exactly the kind of thing a kid would have begged for at a mall counter or a concert merch table back when covering your notebook in five faces counted as a personality. And little licensees like Button-Up rarely left much behind but the goods themselves, so a carded pair like this is one of the few traces of the company that's left. 🖼️ What people do with these 🎀 Leave them on the Button-Up card and frame the whole thing in a shadow box 💚 Pair the card with an old NKOTB ticket stub or a magazine clipping 👂 Take them off the card and wear them to a reunion show or a New Kids night out 📌 Put them in a collector case with other '80s and '90s pop pins and jewelry 💍 Hang them on a little jewelry tree or set them in a dish as a conversation piece 🎁 Who goes for these Lifelong Blockheads hunting original merch from the band's peak years, first of all. Then the vintage costume and novelty jewelry folks who love a carded, never-worn piece, the '80s and '90s pop culture collectors building a boy-band and teen-idol archive, and anybody from around Troy and Detroit who likes a little hometown manufacturing history. They also make a great gift for a sister, a best friend, or anyone who spent their allowance on New Kids tickets the first time around. 👂 Wearing them They're for pierced ears, each charm hanging from a classic silver-tone fishhook ear wire, and they're built like any dangle earring of the day, light molded charms that are easy to wear. Keep them on the card for display, or take them off and wear them, just like a fan would have back in the day. 🔎 More From The Vintage & Antique Gifts Archive Vintage 1990s New Kids on the Block Dangle Earrings 🥃 NKOTB Pink Logo Charms on Original Button-Up Display Card, Boy Band Fan Jewelry Vintage 1990s New Kids on the Block Earrings — Yellow Variant — Original ButtonUp Card 🎤 NOS Vintage 1990s NKOTB Red Logo Dangle Earrings 🎤 New Kids on the Block Boston Boy Band Stunning Black Onyx Drop Earrings in Sterling Silver Stunning Pink Rhodonite Earrings with Silver Hooks