Most of us are familiar with the kind of promotional clothing used by fun runs and other events, like concerts. Right now the internet is packed with a variety of T-shirts that have been designed to raise funds for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. But many items of promotional clothing, like printed or embroidered T-shirts, have more value than just their fund-raising potential.
• First, these items of clothing commemorate an event or person – this gives them a sentimental value.
• Second, if they are well-designed garments, they also have a chance of developing ‘collector’ status – this is where something that was designed to recognised a current event ends up becoming a nostalgic emblem.
• Third, items like embroidered caps or printed messenger bags have recently developed cult status: this happens when the design is iconic and much copied, but the original item is coveted for its rarity and brand status.
A business can’t necessarily aim to develop these kinds of value in their clothing, but it can always aim to choose designs, colours, styles and qualities of clothing that might help it achieve added value in its chosen staff uniform or promotional clothing.
2012 means Summer Olympics, for the UK at least. Sports clothing retailer JJB is relying on the Olympic boost to pull it out of a slump, in part by appointing four times Olympic Gold winner Sir Matthew Pinsent as anNon-executive director.
But all businesses, not just sports retailers, can benefit from the ‘Olympic effect’. Choosing to invest in the buzz that comes from the Olympics is a good way of building teams and creating new energy in your business. There are two ways of doing this:
1 – picking champions
You may already have sports-people in your organisation – at a much lower level than the Olympic standard. But investing in them and setting up support systems can encourage all your staff to see that you believe in their talents and personal development. Companies can do this by:
1. Sponsoring a local event like a fun run, or a youth football team, or offering to pay for branded sports clothing for an amateur sports team, whether they are darts players or netballers.
2. Getting staff involved in supporting a local football or other team by organising visits to watch matches and investing in promotional clothing that says ‘X business is supporting Y team’ which can be worn in the workplace.
3. Funding a skills development day for local sports people – bringing in a trainer to help sporty types to improve their performance and setting up a stall about your business and what it has to offer alongside the sports work.
2 – making champions
Getting an entire business involved in healthy activity can sound impossible, but if you make active life part of the personal development of all your staff, it bring rewards because they take less time off, have more energy and a great team spirit. Companies can do this by:
1. Picking a range of sports: swimming, running and a ball sport are the best options, and offering staff a range of ways of engaging with them. Some companies offer an extra half hour lunchbreak once a week for people who go to the local pool and swim during that time. Others set up after work ball games and provide printed T-shirts and sporting equipment for staff to take to the local park.
4. Some businesses sponsor a charity and get all employees involved in a fun run or sponsored walk with special motivational branded clothing that links the business to the good cause and creates recognition in the public of the way the company is supporting the local community.
Starting in San Francisco, but taking the world by (quiet) storm at present, what Americans call workwear is the big fashion story at present. The kind of clothing that was worn by cowboys and farmers, factory hands and forestry workers has become a huge fashion statement.
It seems that fashion responds to our primal urges and what most people want now is a job, or at least to look as if they’ve got one, and that means that the basic uniform of the manual worker or tradesman has become one of the most popular fashion looks around.
What’s hot
If your staff wear high-vis clothing, then green is the new black, the bright lime-green used in High Visibility vests was all over the catwalks at the beginning of the year, but glowing orange was nowhere to be seen.
Caterpillar and other work boots, worn with thick cushioned work socks turned down over the top of the boot cuff, were also much in evidence.
The old blue-collar of blue collar workers is trending as a huge hit. Work shirts in shades of blue are outselling other colours three to one in Japan! Worn with the sleeves rolled up, these durable work shirts are not in factories but in the bars and clubs frequented by Japan’s students.
What’s not
Anything too light or lightweight has been ruled out – chunky sweatshirts and heavy boiler suits are in, as are thick work trousers with cargo pockets but right out are thin cotton trousers, slip on shoes and skinny jackets.
The Hen Night of the noughties is going to be a completely different animal to that of the first decade of the new century. Why?
• Brides are older
• Pockets are lighter
• Second marriages are more common
• Same sex ‘weddings’ are the biggest growth market in the wedding field.
So how do you organise one of the ‘new’ Hen Nights?
First, the traditional Hen Night on the evening before the wedding is dead – anything from two to five weeks before the big day has become standard, to allow everybody time to recover.
Day is the new night – daytime activities have become much more popular, especially with older brides and same sex couples – and a lot of these activities are charity related: sponsored swims and runs etc. If you incorporate a ‘doing good’ component in your ‘feel good’ Hen event, get some printed caps showing the name of the bride and the charity she’s raising money for. You’ll often find you get a lot of public support from passers by which is a lovely way to celebrate. Daytime fun also means that your group doesn’t get too drunk too fast which is good, and allows everybody to get to know each other better.
If you’re organising a pamper day or spa weekend, why not have some personalised items? Personalised bags containing inexpensive supplies of nail varnish, face packs, massage oil etc are fun to share – if you pick a different theme for each bag (hair, feet, fingernails, eyes, lips, legs etc) you can each carry out beauty treatments for the rest of the group.
The drinking part of the party is always fun, but make sure that you carry a fully-charged mobile and everybody has your number – it’s really easy for people to get separated, especially if they’ve had a drink or two and then you have the hassle of tracking them down. One hen party had the organiser’s mobile number embroidered in tiny letters on their celebration t-shirts – it meant that even if somebody got lost (or passed out) the organiser could be contacted.
There are a few basic rules to choosing uniform clothing:
• Consult your staff – they are the ones who have to wear what you select, and they may not feel happy about wearing something too outrageous.
As an example, Air New Zealand’s newest uniform look has been criticised by staff who say the flamboyant pink dresses makes them look like drag queens. The new uniform is due to appear in 2011. An airline spokesman the new look as ‘contemporary’ and offering ‘greater expression of femininity’ but a flight attendant who spoke to New Zealand’s Dominion Post said ‘The flight attendants look like drag queens’.
• Consult your clients – they are the ones will think well or badly of your business depending on the uniform you choose.
In 2008, Thames Valley Police replaced some traditional helmets with an embroidered baseball cap to meet the demands of modern policing. But it turned out to be a failure – comments on the hats included the suggestion that it was ‘inappropriate to be in a baseball cap when having to tell a relative that a loved one had died’. And other commentators said the caps was ‘too similar to other uniforms, such as Burger King’. So the new kit has been replaced by the old kit, and everyone seems happier.
• Consult your budget – buying complicated uniforms can be expensive, especially if they don’t work out.
Instead of following Air New Zealand’s example, start by adding a pink T-shirt with a DTG printed image on it. If your staff and customers are happy with that, you can expand the uniform line, adding a cap, then a jacket with an embroidered logo etc, but if it doesn’t work out, the experiment isn’t too costly and doesn’t result in a public relations failure.
At present, many winter uniforms seem to be lacking enough clothing, with many companies rushing to order jackets and coats for their staff and even sending desperately short-notice orders for fleeces which chilly employees can wear over their uniform shirts or even, for the truly unlucky, branded T-shirts! Hats, scarves and gloves for those working outdoors have also become important, and several major industries in the UK have been handing out insulated turn-up hats to employees who have to travel between warm premises and the cold of outdoors.
Embroidery is the ideal form of decoration for both winter jackets that have a chest logo and for hats, with the added advantage that a hat with a logo on the middle front is easier to get the right way round on your head! Embroidered clothing for outdoor wear gives a strong image to a company and because embroidery is durable it copes well with the rigours of being worn outdoors in all weathers as well as coming up fresh after frequent laundering.
Many employers have wised up to the advantages of providing a uniform that allows for a number of layers such as a printed T-shirt to be worn under a shirt, fleece, jacket or overalls, along with a long-sleeved sweatshirt or hoodie that can be worn alone, with a T-shirt under it, or layered with a fleece to provide extra protection in low temperatures. The same T-shirts can be worn in summer, with lightweight trousers so that instead of moving from winter to summer wear on a given day, staff can choose from a range of clothing that meets the demands of the changeable British weather.
As green-based companies move further into the mainstream, giving good value to customers and staff is becoming vital to sustainable good business. Just labelling any business eco-friendly no longer works and has become known as green-washing.
Green business runs deeper than the products or services you offer. It involves behind-the-scenes environmental responsibility including issues like energy conservation, waste control and green purchasing. Big business is changing fast and smaller companies are being challenged on their supply chain. This can include issues such as providing an environmentally sourced uniform for staff, using recycled stationery and ensuring that promotional materials such as custom-designed T-shirts and posters are sustainably sourced.
If you are starting your green programme from scratch you can learn from eco-entrepreneurs like Ben Jerry’s ice cream or Innocent smoothies. These are companies that have created huge corporate success by focusing on every aspect of their green bottom line such as using cleaning and catering companies that pay fair wages and use environmentally-friendly products, giving staff loans to buy bicycles to communte to work and working with taxi companies with electric cars, and clothing companies using organic and fair-trade fabrics.
There’s no need to make changes that are not commercially justifiable – improving your green bottom line should also improve your business success.
Using promotional tools such as social media, competitions, and printed or embroidered clothing bearing details of special offers or promotions is more likely to offer a sustainable route through the recession than discounting prices for businesses, recent research suggests.
The reasons are that cost-effective branded clothing has more benefits for a company, such as promoting unity in the workplace and building brand recognition in actual and potential customers.
Whether you choose to invest in custom printed T shirts or embroidered polo-shirts, or just promotional bags with your website and logo, the return on your investment will be greater than simply slashing prices because you get a longer return for investment than the short-term gain obtain from cutting your profit margin.
Visibility is key to maintaining brand recognition and company uniform is a great way of delivering this at the same time as promoting a sense of belonging and loyalty in your staff team. Wearing printed promotional clothing to trade fares or other networking events also allows you to pass a subliminal message even to the people you don’t get to meet face to face, as the image of your logo will impress itself on their subconscious.
Famed British psychologist and magician Richard Wiseman has suggested four ways that people can stand a better chance of keeping their New Year’s Resolutions. They are:
1) Break your goal into a series of steps, focusing on creating sub-goals that are concrete, measurable, and time-based.
2) Tell your friends and family about your goals, thus increasing the fear of failure and eliciting support.
3) Regularly remind yourself of the benefits associated with achieving your goals by creating a checklist of how life would be better once you obtain your aim.
4) Expect to revert to your old habits from time to time. Treat any failure as a temporary set-back rather than a reason to give up altogether.
It all makes perfect sense, but how can businesses adapt his tested methods to achieve their own resolutions?
1. Work with your team or staff to identify the sub-goals that lead to the big result. If dispatch need to be processing 25% more orders a year, can they work faster, or smarter by finding streamlined ways of doing their job? If sales need to sell 25% more can it be achieved by up-selling, cold-calling, converting more queries to sales? When you’ve identified each sub-goal, give it a deadline and have it printed on T-shirts for your team so that they know what they have to do to meet the goal.
2. ‘We’re getting orders out by 3pm this month’ or ‘In February we’ll beat our competitor’s deals by 5%’ is a message your staff can wear and your customers can understand. It makes them accountable to everybody they meet and they will know they’ll have to answer questions on that target and how they are getting on with busting it, and that provides motivation. When they meet those sub-goals, give them celebratory T-shirts to show that you know they’ve done what they committed to.
3. If you’re going to host a dinner at a local restaurant, or give everybody a productivity bonus when they hit their target, get that printed on T-shirts too: put the restaurant’s menu on the front so every team member is reminded when they look at a colleague that they’re working for something they really want. Alternatively, print aprons with the restaurant logo on and hang them up around the department to remind everybody of the great reward ahead. If it’s money you’re giving, have the amount embroidered on a cap that each supervisor wears so that the team get a constant incentive to work towards success.
4. If a monthly target is missed, don’t yell and shout, just give the team a ‘better luck next time’ reward such as a vest or sleeveless T-shirt that thanks them for trying and encourages them to achieve more next month.
Clothing carries a lot of social symbology – the hoodie, reviled as the clothing choice of anti-social youth, is also the garment of choice for the boxing fraternity, in fact it’s hard to find a picture of Amir Khan clothed, where he’s wearing anything else!
T-shirts are seen as the casual clothing chosen by those who are relaxed and out to have a good time, which is why Durham City Council has chosen them as a reward for good behaviour over Christmas. When drinkers in city pubs by food or a non-alcoholic drink, they are being offered a black T-shirt with an image that resembles a rock band logo, saying Best Bar None, and the hope is that it will cut alcohol related crime by reducing binge drinking. Carol Feenan, Durham County Council Best Bar None Manager, said, ‘The free T-shirts are proving extremely popular amongst both customers and staff alike.’
So if clothing carries such strong images, what does your company’s uniform say about you? Would a new style polo-shirt improve your image of efficiency and calm, or perhaps smarter shirts with an embroidered monogram would help create the air of upmarket service that you wish to convey? Maybe your casual friendly attitude would be better conveyed by a slimline fleece than your current bulky jackets? Choosing uniforms that convey the right social symbology can really help your business generate the right impression.
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