I foolishly decided to play football up in Edinburgh this weekend and if the 10 hour return journey wasn’t bad enough, we also lost! However this morning while on the bus, it was the very same city that put a smile on my face. Today the Edinburgh festival announced what the funniest jokes of the festival had been as well as naming and shaming those comedians who had flopped with jokes that were more suited to Christmas crackers. With it being Monday, I thought we could all do with a chuckle to lighten up our blues, so here are just a few of the highly praised one-liners:

1) Tim Vine “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”

2) David Gibson “I’m currently dating a couple of anorexics. Two birds, one stone.”

3) Emo Philips “I picked up a hitch hiker. You’ve got to when you hit them.”

4) Jack Whitehall “I bought one of those anti-bullying wristbands when they first came out. I say ‘bought’, I actually stole it off a short, fat ginger kid.”

5) Gary Delaney “As a kid I was made to walk the plank. We couldn’t afford a dog.”

It seems a shame for such great gags to not be shared, so why not choose your favourite and help spread some Monday cheer for once!  I’ve done a couple of example T-shirts for you below, see which one is your favourite or make your own via the website. 

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I am the American Dream, Mrs Federline, Brunettes are so hot right now, He loves me

In my opening blog, I made you a promise that I would bring you some inspiration and a bit of fun. Well who better to provide both than Britney Spears! It seems that she is the leading celebrity in wearing printed t-shirts…

Now I know taking fashion advice from a woman who has shaved her head and been booked into a psychiatric ward might seem a little strange but if there is one think this pop princess definitely knows, its how to make a statement. In her life of flashing light bulbs and paparazzi, Britney is well aware of all the stories that the press have been writing about her. When everyone wants a piece of her, its seems she wants her T-shirt to do all the talking for her.

For Britney it seems the best way to get something off your chest, is to get it printed on it. So if you got something bothering you, get it out of your mind and down on fabric! Have a look at our printable t-shirts.

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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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The success of the massive American TV show Glee has led to an increased interest in the idea of the glee club. A glee club is a musical group, usually dressed identically in a bright uniform, that sings short songs – traditionally in trios or quartets, and amazingly, the very first Glee Club was founded at Harrow School, in London in 1787!

Today the glee club is being used to promote workplace harmony – literally. Big companies are using the staff room dynamic to encourage teams to form, sing a song and get marks out of ten from the rest of the staff during lunch-breaks. It’s become so competitive in some places that unions are looking at the effect of ‘glee bullying’ and glee-style T-shirts are becoming popular in big factories

And if you don’t want your workforce singing on the job, recent research has shown that the colour orange inspires most workplace optimism and even as simple a thing as changing the colour of a logo embroidered on a work polo-shirt to orange can be enough to create a feeling of positive expectation and dynamism in the workforce.

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Many companies, or even colleges, end up as brands.  Laurie Essig, over at True Slant, is bemoaning the way the college she attended, Franklin and Marshall, has become one of the most wanted casual clothing brands in Europe and Japan, without the actual clothing line having anything to do with the college at all!

At the same time, HMV are hoping to turn around a declining market share by creating an ‘entertainment-inspired’ clothing range that launches in June. The line will feature rock and film imagery on music themed T-shirts aimed at the 18-30 male market and checked shirts and scarves for ‘festival-chic’ women. It’s the spearhead of a strategy that will move the company away from its traditional lines of CDs and DVDs into more ‘lifestyle’ sales.

So while your business might not seem to lend itself to establishing a strong clothing brand, it’s worth considering if the next Caterpillar boots trend or the rapidly building craze for cowboy hats could launch from, or help support, your business.  There’s a current desire for retro style aprons which any catering or hardware company could tap into, by creating branded pinnys for sale. And skinny leg jeans are being supported by husky work shirts, which is a great chance for engineering and trade businesses to put their workforce into fashionable uniforms that can also be sold or given to clients as a goodwill gesture.

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Companies evolve, but uniforms don’t always seem to evolve with them – the two ways that a company really marks itself out as having lost touch with the developing world of business are having an out of date logo and having an old-fashioned uniform.

Promotional clothing allows a business to relaunch itself and to slam out a powerful marketing campaign that reinforces an established customer base, attract trade and increases sales by reminding everybody why that firm been around so long and what keeps it ahead of the competition.

One way to demonstrate your evolution is to use retro uniform items to highlight how far you’ve come in the time you’ve been established. One computer company did this by celebrating 15 years in business, in 2008 by getting all their staff to wear 1993 clothing and playing the hits of that year as their call holding music for the first month of the year, as well as having their site teams wear specially printed T-shirts that used the titles of hit TV shows and songs of 1993 to refer to the company’s ‘long’ history. Well, it’s long in computer terms!

Campaigns like this can get local press coverage too, as people love to hear about the quirky ways that local companies are behaving.

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A year ago today it was announced that from the beginning of the month, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group had became a sponsor of the Brawn GP Formula 1 racing team.  The newly sponsored car, driven by Jenson Button, has been one of the biggest promotional successes in the past 12 months for Virgin, and Jenson Button’s been pretty happy about the past year too!

So how can a smaller business make promotion work for them?

Begin by planning at least six months in advance. If your business is seasonal, aim your big promotional push for a period at least 3 months ahead of your busy time – if you sell wedding cakes, doing all your promotional work in June is daft, as that’s when most brides are getting married – you need them to be thinking about you in January! Also, suppliers of promotional items such as overprinted bags will be able to offer you a better deal the longer ahead you organise your promotional supplies.

Think about sport as a promotional vehicle

Sports promotion has two big advantages: publicity and public relations – supporting local athletes is always good publicity and it’s good public relations for the sponsor.

Pick a local club such as a hockey team or a junior football league and ensure your name is on the sporting equipment such as kit and casual clothing worn for warm-ups.

Make sure you do all the public relations work you can – it’s not enough to have your logo on team clothing, you also need to organise things like visits by the team to your workplace, days out for local children who have special needs to meet the players and try out the sport in question etc. All this builds a strong brand association between you and the team and public service.

Use sporting success to support your business

If your team wins, get your staff into some printed celebration T-shirts marking the victory, it’s a talking point with customers and gives your staff a real motivational boost to be supporting a winning team.

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When you see celebrities getting off a plane, they never look like the shambling dishevelled wrecks we are when we fly. Going first class helps, but celebs are also clever about what they wear on flights. Boldy printed T-shirts are a top choice for two reasons:

1.    You can dress them up or down
2.    They are easy to transport

And a third reason, that might not matter to Paris Hilton or Victoria Beckham, but does to the average traveller – they are economical to buy and clean.

There’s really only one downside – T-shirts do tend to  wrinkle. Here’s how to get rid of the creases before wearing a T-shirt when you don’t have an iron handy:

1.    Put your T-shirt in a tumble dryer with a slightly damp towel – after fifteen minutes the towel will be dry and the shirt free of wrinkles
2.    No tumble dryer? Hang your T-shirt on the shower rail and run the shower as hot as it goes – after a few minutes the creases will drop from the T-shirt. If your wrinkled garment is a screenprinted T-shirt remember to turn it inside out before putting in the tumble-dryer to prolong its life.
3.    No shower? How about this – dampen the most wrinkled parts of the garment, and then dry them using a hair dryer set on medium – put your hand between the front and back of the T-shirt to allow the air to circulate faster – this literally blasts the creases away.

Polo shirts can also be perked up using this method, especially if they are the 50/50 cotton/polyester polo-shirts which tend not to crease anyway. In winter, heavyweight sweatshirts have the same appeal, but if you want to wear one that you’ve packed for a flight, don’t fold it in your carry-on bag, instead, roll it up with the sleeves crossed over the front – that way you don’t get any square creases that are obvious when you wear it.

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The England team have revealed their new 2010 World Cup strip, which is based on the 1966 World Cup winning shirt. It’s a red jersey with the standard Three Lions logo which has above it a raised red embroidered star, to celebrate England’s one World Cup victory.

Using embroidery in this way is a classic style that adds intricacy without making a garment look too fussy. Standard uses for embroidery include:

Promotional wear – like the England strip described above. Because embroidery has a long pedigree, it carries echoes of tradition and ceremony. But as contemporary embroidery is designed and carried out using computer technology, there is no limit to the size, shape and colour of the text that can be sewn to a garment and still be legible.

Brand images – company logos  and monograms are commonly used on work clothing – where a personalised uniform may carry the staff member’s name as well as the company logo.

Monogramming – famously, young women embroidered their initials on sheets and pillowcases in their ‘hope’ chests and then, when they found a husband, rushed to add his initials to their monogram before the wedding. Today monogramming is seen on everything from plush towels in a spa through to the pockets of the smart shirts worn by City traders.

Embroidery is one of the most durable ways to decorate clothing, as well as being one of the most impressive looking, which is probably why the England designers have chosen to embroider the single red star, for the 1966 win, so elegantly over the England symbol on the football shirts they hope will be worn in another victorious final.

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