About us

ButtonWorx™

We know buttons!

Top quality products
Designed and manufactured in the USA
Sold World Wide!
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30-days money back guarantee

ButtonWorx™ became official in 2015 but the story started long before then. ButtonWorx creator Ben Jordan started in the telecom repair business back in 1992 fixing desk phones for business phone systems. The #1 problem was... you guessed it... BUTTONS! Some of those phones were over $1000 each back in the 90s and a business could have dozens or even hundreds of them at one or more locations. This was before the internet and we advertised in the back of specialty industry magazines. With a 1 year warranty on repair service, finding a lasting method for repairing buttons was a must. Ben tried everything out there and a few things that weren't. All the paints, coatings, stickers, glues, epoxies etc... that people would coat the old keypad conductive pads, none of it would last. Nothing sticks to rubber especially when you flex and press on it with every push of a button. Conductive coatings would chip and peel off, getting lodged in the circuitry and shorting out the keypad stopping all the buttons from working. SO! If sticking something to the rubber side of the switch wasn't an option, the only thing left is sticking something to the circuit board side instead. That's when Ben started experimenting with membrane keypads. Probably around 1994, too long ago to remember with certainty. For years we made membrane keypads by hand, learning what materials worked and what didn't.

It all started with this phone. The Comdial Executech!
These things have a lot of buttons. The entire keypad board is sealed together with melted plastic tabs. You had to cut off the plastic to remove the board only to find a terrible button design made with conductive paint on hard rubber. The paint wore off fast and stuck between the gold forked button contacts which stopped any and all buttons from working since the phone thought someone was holding down one of them all the time. These phones cost upwards of $400 each new and the buttons failed after a year or two. Ben repaired these phones for 20 years. Every now and then we would get one back that had already been repaired for one reason or another. The keypads however always worked! Repaired with the predecessor of ButtonWorx™.

I wish I could show you the machine Ben made to test the buttons but back then video cameras were bigger than a breadbox and recorded on magnetic tape. No MP4 files or USB cords. There were two machines. The first was a magnetic solenoid that activated and pressed a button. A circuit looked for an open switch, activated the solenoid that pushed on the button, checked to make sure the switch closed, then released the solenoid and checked to make sure the switch was open. It could handle about two button presses per second and we had it running for a little over a week. The machine broke a few times and needed repair. The button however worked perfectly! Machine two a few years later was a rotating wheel with a little piston arm that pressed the button once every turn. The button being tested was then hard wired to a calculator button and each time the button was pressed +1 was added to the equation.

Anyway... after years of creating membrane keypads for repair service and advertising "an improved keypad" with every repair. there was the occasional customer that would ask to buy the membrane keypad so they didn't have to mail in their phone and wait for its return. They had to be disappointed because at the time it was more of a procedure than a product. But in 2015 Ben came up with a way to make a sellable product. A 1 step peel and stick button repair. The first sellable product was for the Panasonic KX-TGA450b cordless phone.

In early 2021 Ben applied for a trademark for ButtonWorx and after a full year of waiting due to COVID delays, it was made official.