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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It may seem insane to be thinking about promotional jackets now – given our tropical weather – but it’s the perfect moment to consider revising your uniform so that you have jackets that meet the needs of your staff and the needs of your company.

Staff requirements from promotional jackets

1.    Easy to wear: clothing must allow the wearer to move easily, especially when undertaking tasks like loading vehicles, putting out stock, moving items of equipment etc
2.    Washable: any garment has to be fresh and clean, so ensure your choice of jacket can be machine washed so that your employees have a chance to launder their outerwear easily
3.    Breathable: in some environments a thick jacket is necessary, in others a lightweight one is better. Consider zip lining jackets or ordinary fleeces that can be worn under a waterproof jacket to allow staff to adjust their outer clothing to the conditions they experience

Brand requirements from promotional jackets

A jacket embroidered or printed with a company logo allows a brand to advertise itself, but it needs to be:

1.    substantial – so that it lasts for several years: anything too lightweight won’t be a worthwhile return on the company’s investment
2.    appropriately designed – an embroidered logo looks stylish, lasts well and gives an impression of seriousness and longevity. On the other hand, a bright over-printed jacket gives an impression of youth and freshness
3.    worn! Seriously – a jacket that the staff hate just won’t be worn in public and that means your promotional budget is wasted.

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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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A failing Norwich comprehensive school is being turned into an academy and as part of the drive for excellence, the pupils will wear Savile Row-tailored school uniforms. Designed by Thomas Mahon, who has dressed the Prince of Wales, the new uniform with a traditional logo: a school crest; a jacket and formal trousers is set to create a smarter attitude according to the new academy’s head. She says ‘The Savile Row uniform shows we want the best for the school and students. It shows we hold the students in high esteem that we have got them the best possible uniform’.

But in Huddersfield bus drivers are overheating about their workplace clothing. They want to be allowed to wear tailored shorts as part of their uniform, but recent new clothing rules outlaw shorts, although passengers are wearing the bare minimum on the hot, city-centre buses. One driver said, ‘we have asked the managers if we can change the uniform, but they had said it is not company policy.’

What role does uniform have?

Both these cases seem to suggest that a minimum standard is set by clothing, and that those wearing the clothing are encouraged in some way to reach for a certain level of behaviour and attainment through wearing the clothing.

On the other hand, clothing that is overly restrictive and uncomfortable may contribute to lack of attention to tasks and to frustration and even rebellion on the part of those being forced to wear it.

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We tend to assume that logos are a modern invention but they date back to the so called ‘dark ages’ when the world was starting to industrialise and people were no longer totally self-sufficient. They needed to buy bread, beer, shoes and other daily items, but they couldn’t read, so when they got to town they would visit a market. Once markets began to give way to shops, the business would hang a symbol outside to show what was on sale inside. We use the same system today: a roof and walls means a building firm, while a glass with a foaming top is clearly indicating a place that sells alcohol.

How to decide what to include

A good designer will focus on your business but use some fresh ideas to give your logo a distinctive look. There are thousands of companies that incorporate a computer, keyboard or mouse in their designs to show they are related to the internet, but more imaginative uses are also possible – a computer repair company has a monitor on a stretcher as its logo and this picture is embroidered on polo-shirts worn by their technicians.

Colour choice is vital – dark colours show seriousness and business-like behaviour, bright ones suggest fun and excitement. Red is for danger, blue is masculine, pink feminine and grey and navy blue are ‘classic’. Picking the right colour is vital, especially for your workplace uniform.

Think about colours that wear well, are easy to wash and don’t blend into the background when displayed on printed clothing – a navy logo isn’t much good on a navy T-shirt! Unless you have a huge budget, stick to simple colours. Choosing just two, with black counting as one colour, will keep your costs down.

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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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We’re all familiar with a few of the classic ways of using promotional clothing: chuggers in the street in branded T-shirts with charity logos; staff in shops with smart embroidered logos on their uniform polo-shirts and so on.

But there are many more ways to make promotional clothing work for your business:

•    Cheerleaders for local teams – sponsoring a cheerleading team can be a great way to get your name in front of the public, and it doesn’t have to be a bunch of athletic girls who wear your printed clothing – there’s a rugby team in Wales that has a male voice choir as its cheerleading section, and in the Home Counties, one furnishing store is sponsoring the local clog-dancing team to entertain the fans between overs at cricket. You can use this approach imaginatively – what about town criers in branded clothing, or sponsoring a dancing dragon for Chinese New Year celebrations in your town?

•    Useful items – a sandwich bar has overprinted plastic rain hats with its telephone number and has a member of staff giving them away outside the local station on rainy days. Women grab the hats and turn up later to buy sandwiches! Overprinted promotional bags are an ideal useful item to give customers.

•    Celebratory gifts – World Cup T-shirts are selling fast … need we say more?

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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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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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