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The good news is that the weak pound has caused a surge in export orders, meaning that the manufacturing sector in January saw its swiftest growth for a decade and a half according to the PMI (Purchasing Managers’ Index) but while that may mean a quicker lift out of recession, there are still tough decisions to be made in business.
As everybody tries to limit spending, whilst wooing new customers or trying to persuade existing ones to increase their order books, corporate gifts and promotional items can play a substantial role in helping create an atmosphere of growth and hope. There are three steps to creating a cost-effective promotional scheme:
1. Be sure about the target audience – you need to identify the right people (CEOs or purchasing managers? Mid-level decision-makers or top level executives?) and then choose a promotional item that meets their daily needs. High level executives will not use promotional pens but might see value in a top quality printed bag bearing your company details, while frontline staff will use all the pens you can supply them with but giving them bags would be an over-investment that probably wouldn’t bring enough return on your expenditure to be worthwhile.
2. Refine the message you wish to project – and bear in mind that this isn’t just the slogan you use, but the medium that carries it: an organic fair-trade T-shirt tells a story about your company’s values and aspirations even before you label it with a message. Baseball caps convey speed and youth, so if you’re in the business of fast service, giving embroidered baseball caps as promotional gifts could be an excellent idea.
3. Set your ROI and measurement systems – how will you know
• Who received your promotional item?
• What use they made of it?
• Whether it converted into a new or enhanced income stream?
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.
In a recession it can seem bad business to direct any of your marketing spend towards children, when adults are the ones with what little money there is around, but in fact, marketing to children can bring a big return on investment if you do it ethically and sensitively. Promotional clothing can be a big hit with kids if you get it right.
Why aim at children?
• Kids love having something of their own, and this will create brand loyalty when they are old enough to spend their own money – okay that’s long-term planning but why not?
• Children use pester power to influence adults – when you see kids eating a meal in a certain fast food restaurant this half term you can bet their glum parents would rather be somewhere else, but the free toy in the meal box won the child over and the whining child won the parents over …
What to do to get youth marketing right
• Don’t try to impress young people with your up-to-dateness. It’s really hard to pick out something truly trendy, so plain white T-shirts with an attractive slogan or logo might say ‘modern’ to you but ‘retro’ to a twelve-year-old. Just choose the best design you can and let the kids call it what they will, you want them to wear it, and if they like it, they will.
• Make sure your garments are ethical – many young people are very aware of fair-trade and organic concerns so don’t give them a chance to reject you or your brand on the basis of your T-shirt choice.
• Think seasonally – for younger children, parents choose clothing, so a sun-hat or baseball cap in summer or a warm hat in winter can mean your brand is displayed every schoolday as the grown-up makes sure the child is protected from the sun or winter cold.
• Bags are a great idea too, as most girls and an increasing number of boys will now carry a tote bag to school or college.
Just about everybody is now ‘back-to-school’. After the trauma of the ‘kitting out’ where sulky or terrified children are kitted out with school uniform items, with or without their cooperation, comes the next stage – the losing, destroying or rejecting the clothing that has cost so much time, money and tears.
One way to help your child through this stage, and to help the planet too, is to educate them about organic clothing and get them involved in thinking about how their clothing is made, why a uniform is worn and how they can benefit the environment by choosing organic options for themselves and maybe even getting a school-wide campaign going to support the wearing of organic cotton items such as organic T-shirts for PE or performing groups like school bands who can be outfitted in organic cotton clothing in a very cost-effective fashion.
Online retailers are now a great way to outfit children in eco-friendly clothing for a very reasonable price. Knowing that their clothing is benefiting the planet can often help children, especially fashion-conscious ones, become reconciled to a uniform they hate because if they are teased by their friends about wearing the school issue uniform, such as white polo-shirt and navy trousers, they can say ‘Well okay, it’s not stylish, but it is organic and that means it’s preventing the use of pesticides, and stopping people in the developing world being exposed to toxic chemicals.’
Looked at in this way, a plain white T-shirt becomes a statement about caring for the planet and can remove a lot of the stigma that children feel if they don’t have the most up to date fashions, because they can assert that they are choosing to toe the line with organic clothing items for ethical reasons and that anybody who tries to tease them for it is simply showing their own selfishness and lack of care about the world in general.
For the environmentally conscious child, this can become a major issue in accepting the role of uniform as a sustainable way of not wasting clothing or going to unnecessary expense to attend school, and that can give the ‘green child’ a real boost in getting back into the school routine. And it can stop the loss and damage to school items that would otherwise be dropped, cut, abandoned or otherwise rejected.
Just about every business at some time needs to have some small promotional give-aways: those things that are reasonable to buy in bulk, easy to store and transport and can be handed out or posted to people for a variety of reasons from winning a competition, to saying thank you for an order, to recognising that they’ve become a member of a group or club, to joining the company as a member of staff. These items need to have the company or group name and some kind of contact details on them. Simple, right?
Perhaps not. Companies, businesses and organisations need to recognise that any form of marketing has to answer other questions that it raises, such as, ‘how environmental is this company’ or ‘does this club or group demonstrate ethical behaviour’? An example – a children’s drama club shouldn’t be buying the kids T-shirts to wear at rehearsals that may have been created using child labour.
The ‘green revolution’ means that effective marketing also involves ethical and environmental issues – organic clothing and promotional items mean that it’s easy for any organisation to meet this need.
Organic cotton T-shirts, for example, are made from cotton that uses none of the harmful pesticides used in conventional cotton production. This makes the T-shirts eco-friendly and allows the buyer and the wearer both to make a powerful environmental statement because wearing the T-shirt allows them to show that they are limiting their impact on the environment. This kind of behaviour is both good PR and good for the planet. As a result, using organic clothing is superb way to market a brand or gain publicity for a group or team, and organic cotton T-shirts are a simple and cost-effective way to show that your company is on the side of the good guys.
Global market research analyst Mintel recently conducted some research that reveals that sales of organic and ethical clothing more than quadrupled in the period 2004 to 2009, making it a £175 million business by early 2009.
For individuals, and businesses, ethical issues such as fair trade, environmental protection and supply chain problems have become increasingly important and this is one reason that the space for organic and ethical clothing in the market place has grown, but it’s not the only reason.
Another reason is that consumers are watching their pennies and dimes, and it’s natural for them to make careful purchasing choices and they increasingly look for clothing that minimises impact on the environment, and maximises the benefits of trade to those at the bottom of the supply chain. This means that everybody, from the Mum buying school T-shirts for her school-kids, through to the teen at university who wants a hoodie that says something about him that will impress his peer group, through to the HR Manager who is ordering personalised uniforms for a staff of over a thousand, will focus not just on value for money, but also on value to people and the planet.
Organic and ethical baby clothing has been one of the biggest growth areas of this expanding market, and its not at all surprising, when you think of how concerned new parents are to ensure their baby is as healthy and happy as possible. Conventionally grown cotton uses only 3% of the world’s farmland but soaks up 25% of the world’s pesticides – not something anybody wants to contemplate next to their baby’s delicate skin.
So whether it’s a T-shirt for a newborn, rough and tumble training shirts for the local rugby team, or work-wear for hundreds of staff, it’s likely that organic clothing will be the first choice in the future.
China’s formerly booming textiles market has suffered a further downturn, especially in the sales of polo and T-shirt blanks where shipments in the 2008 fell 6% in the first eight months of the year. It is estimated that the overall fall will be 10 – 15% over the 12 months of 2008.
At the beginning of 2008, Chinese suppliers sold more blanks to the EU because of concerns about the strength of the dollar but by August, the EU market had been saturated and Chinese factories began to close – a trend that’s expected to continue in 2009. Many Chinese suppliers are currently closing out orders placed in 2008 but they fear they will have no new orders for 2009.
There are several reasons for this – corporate clients, in particular are sourcing workwear that has a clearer chain of accountability and many are preferring to use organic and fair-trade blanks to ensure they aren’t accused of using child labour or environment-harming fabrics to dress their staff.
Another reason is that some large uniform clients have been ‘leaned on’ to be loyal to local or national suppliers – this means that where before they might have taken the cheapest quote, they have now been persuaded by unions, trade bodies or associations such as Chambers of Commerce, to deal with neighbours in ‘virtuous circles’ that aim to keep businesses in a country or region in business through the recession.
Finally, those who do choose to buy uniforms and promotional clothing entirely on price are moving their sourcing to South and Southeast Asian nations which are undercutting their Chinese neighbours.
Uniforms, whether in the workplace or at school, are really fantastic for building team spirit, allowing the public to identify a group or brand, and wonderful for shaping a business, sporting team or school ethic. But uniforms are expensive too, and keeping a large staff in uniform can send a businesses costs soaring.
There’s another element to consider, as well as a uniform policy needing to be sustainable, it has to be at least as ethical as the company’s own corporate policy – so, for example, if the company says it will treat customers well and suppliers fairly, it can’t afford to have uniform items that are sourced from sweatshops.
What’s the answer? Well one simple solution is to select uniform items that can be easily laundered, and to ensure that those items are sustainably sourced, produced and transported. Ethically produced organic cotton T-shirts for example, overprinted with your brand or company message, can be both cost effective and a powerful marketing tool. If T-shirts are too informal for your company, organic cotton polo-shirts are smarter and just as much a bargain. And they have another advantage – both tee and polos are unisex, so that you can outfit your staff more easily whether they are male or female.
And by the same measure the ‘community service’ brand is about to get a high profile boost. The Home Office has ordered 10,000 orange tops for offenders to wear while they are doing their community service in England and Wales – the high-visibility clothing bears the slogan “Community Payback” to show the public that community-based punishments do actually get carried out by offenders. Would a similar technique work for your staff? If you have dog-walkers, gardeners, a team putting up fencing or something similar, could you turn bad weather to your advantage by showing your brand on high-vis outerwear?
A survey, carried out by Populus, reveals that while the overall rating of every other high street clothing retailer has either gone up or remained steady over the past year, Primark’s has fallen. The findings follow a recent Panorama investigation, revealing that some Primark suppliers in India were contracting out embroidery to firms that used child labour. And a survey by Drapers, the fashion industry magazine, shows that – as a result of the controversy – 44% of Primark shoppers say they would switch to another retailer.
The Populus survey also showed that nearly half of the consumers who expressed concern said that that their biggest worry when judging a clothing retailer is its treatment of workers in developing countries. Quality beat price as the most important factor when it comes to deciding where to buy an item of clothing for most consumers, reflecting a prevailing feeling that consumers are seeking value in terms of quality now that we’ve entered the credit crunch, rather than merely paying the cheapest price.
Such concerns are addressed by The Organic Exchange and Dutch-based fashion transparency label MADE-BY who have created an event focusing on sustainable fashion in Europe. It will be held at The National Library in Copenhagen, Denmark on 2nd and 3rd December. The theme of the event will be how retailers can respond to changes in consumer opinion and the shifting economic situation. There will also be talks on eco-friendly fabrics, consumer communication and marketing and textile labelling and certification.
And there’s a supply line response to this issue too. Intertek has launched a new system for measuring the environmental and socially responsible performance of textile mills. The new Mill Qualification Program (MQP) picks up on the challenges faced by retailers and brands to assist suppliers achieving their social, environmental and quality expectations. MQP quality evaluations cover the stages of textile production: fibre production, fibre processing and spinning, yarn preparation, fabric production, bleaching, dyeing, printing and finishing.
It’s been forty years since the swinging sixties, when the T-shirt has become a must-have for all summer wardrobes. But today it’s not the old tie-dyed version that has to be considered as both a fashion and a political statement. The modern T-shirt has to be made of organic cotton and generally bears a slogan for a charity or cause. Everybody from H&M to M&S has found room for T-shirts made of environmentally-friendly materials, most of them with slogans like ‘preserve Mother Earth’ or ‘no sweat in my T-shirt’ with a picture of a sweatshop worker underneath.
According to a recent MSNBC report, around 2 billion T-shirts were sold worldwide in 2007 and this year sales will rise again. Choices for organic versions of the classic T-shirt include hemp, bamboo, tencel, soy fabric, modal and organic cotton and while wearing a T-shirt is an obvious way to promote a favourite cause or announce a belief system, it also helps to save the planet. Literacy T-shirt courtesy of Wrote
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Customised Uniforms | Promotional Clothing | Embroidered Polo Shirts | Printed T-Shirts | Embroidered Shirts | Personalised Sweatshirts | Promotional Fleeces | Embroidered Clothing | Screen Printed Clothing
Transfer and Cad Cut Printed Clothing | T-Shirt Printing | Cheap Clothes