While the promotional products industry has greatly evolved over the past few years, there are still pitfalls people fall into when planning and ordering promotional products. In this article I reveal the top five mistakes people make when placing such orders. My name is Damien Ellis, I am a founder and director of All In One Marketing and I have more than 20 years’ experience in promotional marketing.
Last minute ordering
This is by far the most frequent mistake. For some reason, most people think that ordering promotional products will be exactly the same as ordering a few T-shirts from ASOS or buying them in bulk from a wholesaler. There is one key difference: there is a logo or branding application on the product involved. As you can appreciate, no business can have complex and expensive machinery sitting idle while waiting for an order to come in. Production is planned for weeks ahead and for some items it is months in advance. Leaving your order to the last minute, hoping that we will manage to squeeze it in to meet your urgent deadline, is leaving your order to chance. While we do have a range of express promotional products that we can decorate and ship in two working days, not only will your choice be limited but you will have to ensure that your artwork is ready to go to the printers. More about this in the next paragraph.
Not using the correct artwork
You choose the perfect product and have a beautiful logo or artwork to be added to promote your brand. You send your artwork to your promotional products supplier only to be told that it cannot be printed, embroidered or laser etched. Why? There are multiple reasons, but I will share the most common ones that we experience on an almost daily basis.
Image is not designed in Vector format
Vector images use mathematical equations to represent shapes and can be scaled infinitely without loss of quality, while JPEG and PNG are raster images composed of pixels and can lose their quality when resized. Why is this important? Printers typically don’t print in pixels. Printers use a variety of methods, such as ink dots or sublimation, to reproduce the image on the physical surface. Vector files can be translated into printer commands more accurately, allowing for a smooth and precise output without the limitations of pixel-based raster images. So the message is clear: always use an image designed in Vector format.
Artwork too complex for small items
The second most common mistake we encounter is receiving a complex logo for printing on small items such as cocktail jiggers or pens. While your logo might look great on the top of the website or screen, it won’t necessarily have the same impact when printed on small items. It might be unreadable or look poor due to details being too close to each other or having complex gradients. In most cases, we can quickly redesign artwork to be printer-friendly while at the same time keeping brand identity.
If you fail to plan you plan to fail
Good planning is key for any successful business activity – and promotional products are no exception. Not planning your promotional products campaign at least six months in advance can lead to multiple failures that could be otherwise prevented. Here are some of the most frequent examples of planning we’ve noticed over the years:
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Failing to plan will leave you with a smaller selection of products to choose from. This is because demand for products fluctuates and many, especially new, great-value products, tend to run out of stock. The reason? The vast majority of products are manufactured across the globe. As well as the time taken to manufacture a new batch of products, there will then be an inevitable delay before they arrive in the UK. This can range from a few weeks for those manufactured in Europe to a few months for those made in the Far East.
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You might not be able to Pantone match your product to your brand guidelines. This is applicable to every single product that you want to be custom-made to match your brand. As it involves custom manufacturing, naturally this takes much longer. Not leaving enough time might leave you with fewer stock product options.
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Overpaying for the same product because of poor planning. When ordering in bulk you always benefit from quantity breaks. For example, if you have three events in the next six months, ordering products that will cover all three means that in most cases you will make a significant cost saving compared with ordering separately for each event. Many companies though have little or no storage space and so believe that planning for a longer period of time is out of their reach. However, we offer very affordable storage and shipping rates, which means our customers who order more than they can store can still enjoy big savings.
Not understanding your distribution network
While we love to sell more, we always urge our customers to clearly understand their distribution network before placing an order. There is nothing worse than having lots of lovely promotional products sitting in the warehouse when they should be in the hands of your customers. Among the key mistakes we’ve noticed companies making when planning a distribution network are the extra costs of distributing promotional items and the popularity of promotional products if sold in a brands gift shop.
You pay cheap, you pay twice
Cheap promotional items can work well if used in the right circumstances. Their lifecycle is generally very short, so if you need some lanyards, pens, notebooks or cups to give away at an exhibition or another event, saving on unit price is a good idea. However, if you want people to keep your promotional product for longer, we always recommend choosing better quality products. Just think about it: would you rather write with a cheap plastic pen or would you prefer a solid, heavier pen made of metal that spreads the ink on paper evenly? Would you keep a T-shirt that is not soft and does not look as good after a few washes? There is a purpose for those cheap products as mentioned above but for long-term use, you should always choose quality over economy. Many times over the years when we’ve recommended better quality items, clients have refused and ordered cheaper ones. More often than not they’ve then come back and asked for a better quality product. The old adage “you pay cheap, you pay twice” is never truer than in the promotional products industry.
