0
Perhaps it’s because we’re British, or perhaps it’s because our weather is so rubbish, and perhaps those two things are actually identical, but this year, when retail sales and clothing purchases online have been pretty moribund, one thing is still walking out the door with incredible regularity: the hoodie.
It’s the garment of choice of the chav (think of poor old Ricky Hatton) and hated by every judge in the country, but it’s still one of the most popular items of clothing in the UK, and that’s astonishing, given that it’s also the most recent introduction into popular clothing culture – not since the T-shirt has anything had such an effect on the way young people dress.
So why is the hoodie so popular? Well one reason is that British weather that defines our character. A hoodie is a coat and a jumper in one – you can pull up the hood and protect yourself from a downpour by tucking your hands in the front pocket, or push up the sleeves and wear it with shorts to make the most of the British summer – it’s the ideal clothing item for a country that can have all four seasons of weather in a single day.
The hoodie also looks good. It has a clean outline and works with something as casual as jeans or as smart as a good pair of formal trousers or a skirt. It can be worn to work, to the pub, to a cricket or football match or to meet the in-laws. It’s casual clothing with extra style that works just as well as part of a working uniform as that classic choice, the polo-shirt. When personalised with a monogram or name it looks fantastic. The hoodie is easy to wash and easy to pack. In short, it’s a stylish life-saver.
So for 2009, whether it’s the best or the worst summer ever, viva la hoodie!
If you belong to any kind of trade body or association, or even just a networking group, you can use their meetings, especially trade shows, conferences and exhibitions, to promote your company in style.
The one thing that everybody takes away from these events, along with other people’s business cards, mini-shampoo bottles from their hotel room, and a sheaf of expenses to claim, is a bag, and if your branded bag is the most stylish on offer, it’s your bag that they will carry around with them for the next few months, maybe even for a year or more. For this reason, the return you make on investing in branded bags is superb.
Not only that, but whatever else people are handing out on the day, it will get put in your bag, so the bag is more valuable to the recipient than almost anything else they obtain.
Aim for the best quality bag or satchel you can afford, as durability is important and don’t forget to get your company name, website and logo printed or embroidered onto both sides of the bag so that whichever way they face they are an advertisement for you. And here’s a tip – if you have bags left over at the end of the show, offer them to the cleaning crew who clear up after the delegates are gone – these are people who go from business venue to business venue every week of the year, and they will carry your name with them, subconsciously informing people at other events about you, without you having to be present.
Assuming that you’ve got something to promote: a brand, a product, a bar or a band, promotional clothing is the perfect choice for cost effective selling.
Printed clothing comes in an almost limitless range of styles, colours and cost ranges, so you can choose exactly the right blend for your product. That might be grunge black T-shirts with a pimped up hummer emerging from the bowels of hell to sell your car modification business to the average ‘modder’, or a beautifully cut white shirt with a delicate monogram to impress the clients at your upscale spa when the see your staff behind the reception desk. Not only that, you can market your brand to senior executives, teenagers or even little kids, all by choosing the right garment and colour combinations to appeal to them.
Your budget may be limited but you can optimise it by choosing carefully when buying promotional clothing. Caps and T-shirts are relatively cheap and convey a powerful message – compared to the lifetime of cheaper promotional items like pens or sticky notes, they get seen by up to sixteen times more people across a wider section of society than any other promotional item except television advertising.
Once you’ve got a promotional approach that works, you can benefit from discounts offered for large quantities so that you get much more promotional clothing for your money. If you overbuy you can use that stock as give-aways for contests so that your excess stock actually serves to promote your brand even more widely. Nothing is wasted! T-shirts can be used as prizes for competitions that people enter online or postally, and caps and other small, one-size-fits-all items can be used at fairs and trade shows, or give to schoolchildren undertaking charity activities in the community, giving you great publicity at little cost.
In March, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group became a sponsor of the Brawn GP Formula 1 racing team. Why do businesses sponsor sports teams or events? For Branson and Virgin, the reasons are clear, ‘Virgin are trying to build the most respected brand in the world and an involvement with a great team will help’ the entrepreneur said. The newly sponsored car, driven by Jenson Button, now bears the Virgin logo and has been renamed the Virgin BGP 001 as well as having a new colour scheme to reflect the sponsorship deal and logos on the team uniform.
For businesses, there are three reasons to get involved with sports sponsorship: publicity, public relations and brand association.
The first is easy enough – get your name on the club’s kit, on the side of the tour bus and on the programmes for each fixture, and you will become better known within that sporting community. It’s also a good idea to ensure, during your sponsorship deal, that the other useful aspects of publicity will be yours too. This means that you need to ask for a club rename if you’re a main sponsor so that your name is used in the team’s title in press releases and other publicity documents and that the casual clothing worn by the team on their way to the match: the team sweatshirts or polo-shirts at a minimum, should also carry your name or at least your logo.
Public Relations is your job, not the sport teams. You need to make sure that you build on the established relationship. You might, for example, organise a day for children to visit the sports club and have a ‘try-out’ or training with the players. You can give commemorative T-shirts to each child, bearing your name, the team’s name and the date, to reinforce the positive role you’re playing in promoting healthy living for young people.
Association is also your responsibility. Assuming you’ve chosen a team that’s doing well, use good results and outright wins to try and promote your business by association. Your staff, for example, could wear ‘Win with X’ T-shirts whenever the team you’re sponsoring has a win to strengthen the positive association between your company and the winning sports team.
The internet is full of companies that claim they can produce promotional clothing – what should you look for in a top-class supplier?
• Think about the future … what about deliveries and returns and re-orders, or alterations that you need to make to your order – are you truly confident that your communications with an anonymous website is going to deliver what you need, not just in terms of goods but also in terms of a relationship that gets you the best clothing at the best price? Picking a company with a real geographic location and with people on the end of a telephone with whom you can explore all the options open to you, is the best way to ensure your promotional clothing investment isn’t wasted.
• You need brands … good clothing is essential if staff and customers are going to wear your promotional gear, and that means reliable and trusted brands that convey a message that supports your own promotional message. Being able to choose from a wide range of recognised brands means that you get exactly the kind of clothing you want, whether it’s budget, luxury or organic.
• A picture paints a thousand words … and seeing samples and a strong portfolio from your chosen supplier will really help you understand what they can do and whether they have the expertise and skills to deliver what you want. If all their designs look similar or if their customer base seems limited to one profession, be warned, they may not be the best company to support your promotional activity.
• Comparisons are NOT odious … a really top-notch promotional clothing supplier will be interested in your plans, whether you’re buying a dozen T-shirts for a one day sale in your shop, or a thousand polo-shirts to outfit waiting staff at hundreds of cafes. They will have ideas to share with you, suggestions on what clothing works best for your circumstances and will be able to point out factors that you may not have considered, like special washing instructions, or that your great idea for an embroidered logo has the same colours as another company’s famous brand image, which could lead to confusion. In other words, they are interested in what they can do for your business, not just what your business can do for them, and that means they will go the extra distance to ensure your promotional clothing does what you want it to.
Embroidery is an ancient artistic technique that is still used today to make a piece of clothing more distinctive. Until the invention of screen printing, there were only two ways to get fabric to carry a message – it had to be either woven in as tapestry or embroidered on with thread, and modern embroidery contains a range of high technology methods and materials to allow the embroidery machine to create intricate patterns that seem three-dimensional, complex writing that can mimic anybody’s handwriting, or detailed images with subtle shading and textures.
Embroidery has a wide range of uses from the creation of elegant logos in metallic thread which give a touch of high style to company uniforms, especially those used in hotel and spa environments, through to bright three-dimensional blocks of colour that make up a company’s logo and stand out against a dark blue or black T-shirt or barkeeper’s apron – both these techniques have particular use in situations like bars, restaurants and other locations that are often low-lit.
Embroidery is also useful in creating promotional clothing for company events as it can conveys information but also gives an air of luxury and classic styling to any clothing, but especially on shirts, blouses and corporate clothing. The scale of embroidery is usually intricate and detailed, which makes it particularly suitable for monograms on cuffs and collars or on bathrobes or caps.
In ‘bespoke’ businesses, those that have a low staff turnover and a reputation of style and luxury to live up to, have names ‘detailed’ which means embroidered on the clothing, looks classic and understated and gives a much better impression than a name badge. If that seems out of your cost range, you can consider embroidery patches which can be made up in bulk and then sewn onto suitable garments or bags or other merchandise. It’s a highly personalised approach that is popular with customers because it looks rich and elegant.
There had been fears that clothing certified as organic by the Soil Association might be about to lose its organic status. This was because a consultation on organic status suggested that goods that were airfreighted to or from the UK could be deprived of organic labelling.
This led to some minor panics, especially in companies that have invested in organic cotton uniforms and work clothing such as promotional T-shirts, to support their ethical business policies. Suddenly their printed or monogrammed clothing looked like it might become just another set of cotton garments, without the organic status that was all important to them.
However it turns out the fears were unfounded: promotional clothing certified by the Soil Association maintains its organic status even if it is transported by air, clothing or textile companies that are already certified by the Soil Association are judged on different standards to those used to certify the food industry. Therefore, uniforms or promotional clothing that have been certified organic will remain organic even if they are flown around internationally to be worn by staff all over the world.
It’s fascinating to watch the world of corporate-speak shifting and changing to cope with the recession. As High Street stores close, and businesses lay off staff, the language that we hear from many businesses is changing too. Words like ‘value’ as in value for money and ‘bargain’ as in cheap and ‘quality’ meaning will last for a long time are replacing ‘investment’ as in buying our stuff is investing in your future and ‘style’ as in our style makes a statement about you and fashion, meaning this isn’t cheap and it won’t last long, but it’s totally up to the moment.
Virgin Atlantic have taken this shift in language into the world of uniforms. Their advert, celebrating a quarter century of international travel, has no words except the soundtrack of Frankie Goes To Hollywood singing “Relax”. But what it does do is pick up on all the themes that are covered in both sets of language above. We see the signature “red-hot” Virgin uniforms on leggy hostesses striding through Heathrow airport 25 years ago. Passengers in pale, unfashionable clothing turn and stare at the glowing clothing, and one man is so entranced that he spills ketchup from his Wimpy burger down his boring white shirt. The red uniformed beauties are accompanied by cute, uniform-wearing male captain who makes meaningful eye contact with a stylish older woman … something for everyone is clearly the message.
The key point though, is twofold. The clickerboards rotate to show that Virgins flights are all ‘on time’ while other flights are delayed, and rival air hostesses frown and look miserable in their boring grey outfits as the Virgin team stride past them. The message is clear, Virgin gets you there on time and in style.
So many messages: happiness, speed, efficiency, glamour, all conveyed by one corporate clothing image … what does your uniform say about your business?
A uniform makes certain statements about a company or business. It says that there is a public image that the organisation wishes to convey – think of the difference between the way a barista wears an apron to make you a coffee and the way a waiter dresses to serve you dinner. It displays the values that the company has, and the aims it wants to achieve, which is why airline staff tend to be formally dressed, to convince travellers that this is a luxurious, elegant way to travel, while pizza delivery men tend to dress in a casual uniform style that focuses on swiftness and relaxed eating.
Polo shirts are a common choice because they are comfortable, easy to wear on a casual basis but also smart enough to be look professional in many industries.
The colour also says a great deal about the organisation’s ‘personality’ – bright colours in polo-shirt imply a young and possibly irreverent company, while classic coloured polo shirts imply stability and old fashioned values. Picking a colour that is part of your logo, or harmonises with it, gives an added sense of coherence and unity. A good designer or supplier will be able to advise you on this aspect of the corporate look.
Recent case studies have shown what we all suspected – the logo is king. But why?
Partly it’s because a logo, emblem or monogram is not language specific. The ‘golden arches’ appear around the world, and have become so ubiquitous that some people don’t realise they are the capital M in McDonalds! Partly the success of logos is down to human nature – over 74% of people find it easier to process images than sounds or words, and that means an immediately identifiable image that relates to your business creates and confirms brand identity every time it is seen.
Clothing is another corporate identity success story – we can all identify airline staff, chefs, and policemen by their clothing, but did you know that most people can also identify over forty individual corporations from the clothing worn by their staff? Whether it’s the UPS guy or the KwikFit fitter, we have an innate ability to learn corporate clothing details and retain them. Amazingly, people can spot the difference between an RAC and an AA staff member at nearly forty yards, on the motorway, at night. And it’s not the colour of their high visibility clothing that people recognise, because asked to say which company wears orange and which wears yellow, most people have no idea. And that suggests that the emblem of each organisation, even at a distance, is instantly recognisable.
What’s also interesting is that people can identify brands very fast even when they are very small emblems on polo-shirts or even simply monograms on a shirt front. We seem hard-wired for this kind of behaviour and that’s good news for companies hoping to build a brand presence because as well as appearing on clothing, the logo should appear on both internal and outgoing material, intranets, websites and emails.
Back to top
© 2003-2008 Quayside Clothing Ltd |
Deliveries and Returns |
Site Map |
Useful Resources |
Privacy Policy |
Conditions of Use
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
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