An East Coast officer was fed up with a floppy badge pinned to his uniform every day. “I spent six months in the academy thinking about the day I got my badge and I remember  feeling a bit disappointed (the day I graduated) because you pin  it through your shirt and then it kind of just hung there,” Officer Mike Kenny of the Lynn, Mass., PD says. “We’re wearing our body armor underneath and your uniform’s all pressed and neat and a badge got pinned on and it just kind of flopped on my shirt, so it was kind of at that point that I recognized the problem.”

After a few years of using a cardboard backing behind his badge, in 2011 Kenny put the American entrepreneurial spirit to work. He invented an inexpensive plastic accessory called the Badgekeeper to serve as a permanent solution to the problem of floppy badge syndrome. But before he came up with the Badgekeeper, there were the many temporary fixes that Kenny and his colleagues used to correct the limp badge.

Take a look at these examples of home-spun solutions that Kenny, his officer colleagues and Badgekeeper buyers have shared showing the different everyday items they’ve used to support their badges.