This month an online shopfront with a difference has opened – it’s for Pope Benedict XVI’s September trip to the UK and offers a series of mementoes: an embroidered baseball cap like the one the Pope has been seen wearing himself this summer, keyrings and fridge magnets and a range of T-shirts including one that can be personalised to include the name of the individual’s local church.

Several commentators have remarked on how similar the highly detailed printed T-shirts are to heavy metal designs and colour schemes it’s hoped they will appeal to a wide range of ‘pilgrims’ to help cover the £7 million cost of the visit.

The church is not alone in merchandising for the trip: the National Secular Society also has an online presence offering T-shirts with the slogan ‘Pope Nope’.

If your business is merchandising for an event or promotion, try thinking about how you offer your merchandise – you can use the angle of local identity, perhaps by promoting your locality, alongside your business, offering T-shirts with maps to local parks but including your shop.

Try point of sale branding if you have a physical location too, such as on sunny days giving away a baseball cap with your telephone number on it, or a rain hat or umbrella on rainy days. You can even offer a random prize for people buying in your shop or ringing up, every sixtieth customer, or whatever, can be sent a promotional T-shirt with their order, and you can give unrecognisable information about each winner (eg their first name and initial of surname, to keep within data protection rules) on your website.

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The most recent example of ambush marketing was insanely successful in getting attention, although the cost may turn out to be too high.

Three dozen pretty women wearing bright orange mini-dresses stole the show during the World Cup. Every camera, including the TV ones, was focused on them, right up until the moment that they were kicked out of the stadium. They’d been hired by a brewery (Bavaria) to promote the company during the football match. Now two of the women and the brewery are facing charges “organising unlawful commercial activities”. And it wasn’t just the pretty women, Robbie Earle was in the stadium as an ambassador for England’s 2018 World Cup bid but he was dropped as a TV commentator and ambassador because the orange lovelies got into the match using tickets he was given for distribution to his family and friends.

Why all the fuss? Because Budweiser paid millions to have exclusive beer representation during the competition.

Sponsorship is big business and ambush marketing tries to achieve the same level of coverage for almost no expenditure. The little orange dresses had only a tiny brand marker, but every Dutch person had already seen the exact same dress being worn by the wife of Rafeal van der Vaart – one of Holland’s best players.

And it’s a dirty business – Linford Christie once wore contact lenses with a cut-out of a puma on them to a press conference, because his status as an Olympian forbade him promoting his sportswear sponsor at Olympic events. And Michael Jordan actually covered up his Reeboks vest when Nike sponsored not the US basketball team, but just the team’s news conferences!

So if you can get away with using some kind of promotional clothing to launch an ambush marketing caper around a sporting event, you might decide it’s worth a try, but don’t mix it with the Olympics! The Olympic committee are notorious for aggressively defending their logo and even words associated with the Olympics, and fines for breaking their rules are substantial – up to £20,000 for each offence.

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As long as the good weather holds, people will want to be outdoors – and that means that promotional activities including outdoor cooking will be incredibly popular.  Offering burgers or hot dogs and their vegetarian equivalent can be a brilliant wheeze to get people to visit your business.

It’s easier to hire in a caterer than to do it yourself as they will have the skills to ensuring cooking and serving staff meet the demands of legislation in terms of health and safety and hygiene and that people get served swiftly and professionally.

Make sure your hired-in staff are wearing your promotional clothing: invest in T-shirts with a strong promotional message for those who are clearing tables and cleaning up. Teamed with printed aprons and logo-embroidered caps for people actually serving food, the complete clothing range means that everybody looks smart and everybody is carrying the same message that supports your business.

Take it to the max by having napkins overprinted with your business details and giving away squeezy sports drink bottles with a promo message from your firm. You can even invest in customised ‘doggy bags’ with your business name and address details on them.

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When you choose a logo, consider using a monogram. This is classically a design composed of one or more letters and it was often used as part of a signet (or signing) ring to seal documents with wax.

Today there are very famous monograms such as Yves St Laurent and Luis Vuitton which have become brand identifiers – perhaps the same is possible for you?

A good monogram says something about the business it represents – it both identifies the company and encapsulates it. In addition, a monogram has to be swiftly identifiable, clever, easy to reproduce in a variety of ways, and not too expensive to replicate.

A gold logo, for example, looks fantastic on buildings, but could be prohibitively expensive to reproduce on polo-shirts. In this case changing the gold to yellow could reduce costs while keeping the same ‘feel’ to the overall design.

Many logos are three dimensional, a design feature which can be achieved with embroidery as well as ink or transfer, and which looks particularly good on a cap or knitted hat as well as making a good emblem design for coveralls and high visibility clothing.

Simple white stitched monograms look particularly good on formal work shirts, towels and aprons, where they give an impression of cleanliness and classic styling.

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Sports broadcasters often say that a player has been ‘capped’ for England (or any other country) a certain number of times, but most of us don’t even know what it means and why it’s said.

Back in history, uniforms for sporting events were reserved for select activities such as polo or cricket (or hunting, when that was allowed) because being able to invest in a distinctive uniform was evidence that you were a gentleman and therefore fit to take part. Popular sports such as football were played by working men who had no money for kit and so they would take to the field in any old clothes, but they would wear a cap if they were playing for one team, and be bare-headed if playing for the other. In 1872, a national football match between England and Scotland shows the Scots wearing something like a balaclava while the English wore a range of caps, mostly those that had been summer uniform at the players’ public schools! So ‘being capped’ was being chosen for a team and the term has come to denote a national honour.

Caps are an incredibly popular promotional item because they protect from both sun and rain and are natural advertising objects – if you overprint or embroider a cap, the legend it bears can be seen by everybody who encounters the individual wearing it. Even if he or she turns it round, like a skateboarder, the image is clearly visible to everybody behind him or her! This means that if you have a publicity campaign, a product that you want to promote or a new service to tell the world about, investing in promotional caps can bring you a fantastic return over a long time frame.

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There’s a fantastic range of ways to celebrate and commemorate family events with printed clothing:

1.    One increasingly common way of marking the arrival of a new baby, now that fewer people are christening their children in church, is to hold a naming day. Often this combines a family reunion with a party for the baby, and can be held outdoors. T-shirts are often printed for the family members, bearing the baby’s name and date of birth and speeches are made, toasts drunk and the new arrival is celebrated with music and laughter.
2.    Another big hit with the parents of little ones is the way that party bags are being replaced by a piece of commemorative clothing such as a printed organic baby T-shirt which is given to guests at the end of a birthday party. For older children, a printed baseball cap is a popular leaving gift.
3.    T-shirts are also becoming popular as wedding clothing – gifts for bridesmaids, ushers, and ring-bearers are often now personalised printed garments with bearing their name and their role in the wedding as well as the date of the celebration. And of course stag and hen night T-shirts have become an institution in the UK.

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It’s great to have your employees in uniform, because it gives a snappy professional impression of your business, but it can also be an expense that drains you, without seeming to contribute anything to your profits.

Used properly, a uniform builds team stability, boosts productivity and gives your people a feeling of confidence.

One way to work your uniform as far as you can, is to take a good look at how your staff are actually wearing it. Simply walk round the building, taking a digital photo of everybody and then look at them all, one after another, in quick succession. What you see may surprise you.

Are your staff rolling up the sleeves of their company branded sweatshirts? Is there a tendency to wear cardigans or fleeces over their polo-shirts, or colour coordinated T-shirts under them?

The way uniform is worn can indicate gaps in your uniform wardrobe or ways to revise your uniform options cost-effectively. You can stick with your current uniform offering and add in a simple sleeveless fleece over the top to deal with the issue of people who aren’t warm enough in a polo-shirt alone. Alternatively, offer a T-shirt in addition to the sweatshirt or allow staff to customise their sleeves by actually cutting them off, if you’re a casual kind of place and it doesn’t interfere with Health and Safety issues.

Adding a stylish cap can revitalise an existing uniform – embroidering it with your logo and perhaps offering a contrasting colourway is a great way to give a whole new feel to the clothing your team already wear.

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There are two ways that wearing a uniform makes a difference: to the customer and to the employee.

First, customers respond positively to uniform clothing, which is why some of the world’s largest employees use uniforms like T-shirts or over-printed polo-shirts to offer a professional image and a strong brand message that encourages customers to buy from, or invest in, your business. More than 50% of businesses who took part in a recent poll, said that they preferred to use service providers whose employees wore uniforms. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a link between the type of uniform worn and their response – businesses were equally happy with simple printed T-shirts bearing the company name and logo or with complete uniforms that combined a range of elements such as monogrammed names on shirts, embroidered caps, overprinted jackets and fleeces and branded bags or toolboxes.

The employee benefits because they have a uniform that means they don’t have to damage or risk their own clothing and because they have a strong sense of unity and team spirit that arises from wearing corporate clothing. In addition, uniform clothing is specially designed to be more comfortable and more durable than other forms of clothing and may have specific elements of health and safety – such as reflective band, knee protectors, fire retardant qualities, protection from sun etc, built in.

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Recent research in the USA shows that women are three times better than men at remembering names and logos. This means that to get the best return on your promotional activity, it may be a good idea to focus on choosing items that appeal to women as that gives you a 75% higher chance of being remembered! Another report shows that women who see a brand name on TV or around the home are five times more likely to seek out that brand when shopping than those who don’t have exposure to that brand.

Promotional clothing can be an ideal way of marketing your company, goods or services to women but you need to ensure that you choose well-fitting, fashionable and comfortable items as women are notoriously fussy about what they wear and will reject anything ugly, old-fashioned or ill-fitting.

Simple T-shirt shapes in classic colours are particularly popular with women – white or navy are the most popular summer colours with grey and black being winter favourites. Remember that any colour that it’s difficult for certain people to wear (such as red for redheads) can limit the ability of your garment to be worn by large numbers of people and again, women are much more likely to reject popular casual clothing items in the ‘wrong’ shades.

Equally popular, and increasingly sought after, are caps and summer hats for children. It seems that as we become more aware of the effects of sun on young skin, women are taking the responsibility for protecting small people from UV damage and hats that keep the sun off kiddies’ faces are a real winner for summer promotions.

In winter, overprinted bags may be the best bet, as carrying shopping etc in bad weather can mean that a roomy and well-designed bag gets used for months on end.

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The classic cotton T-shirt could soon become comfortable body armour for soldiers or police officers, according to a research team based in the University of South Carolina, collaborating Chinese and Swiss researchers, who’ve managed to increase the toughness of a T-shirt by linking the carbon it contains naturally with boron: the third hardest material on earth. The scientists started with plain, white T-shirts that were cut into thin strips and dipped into a boron solution.

The strips were later removed from the solution and heated in an oven. The heat changes the cotton fibres into carbon fibres, which react with the boron solution and produce boron carbide. The result is a fabric that’s lightweight but tougher and stiffer than the original T-shirt, yet flexible enough to bend with body movement. The resulting boron-carbide fabric can also block almost all ultraviolet rays, making it a good sunscreen too!

In the meantime you can keep your staff safe at work by choosing uniform items carefully:

•    High visibility T-shirts are ideal when people are working in hot situations but need to be seen easily, such as in heated warehouses.
•    Coveralls allow people to protect their own clothing from spills and stains and other toxic substances as well as providing a great opportunity to publicise your business with a printed image and address details.
•    Sturdy caps are essential to protect the eyes from strong sunlight and can be embroidered to give a professional impression even when people are working outside.

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