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?

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If you have a workforce, whether of several hundred, or just two or three, offering them a high quality piece of clothing as a Christmas gift can be a great way of rewarding their hard work over the previous year and showing them that you recognise their contribution to your company’s performance.

Polo-shirts and T-shirts are ideal presents for a younger member of staff, and if you personalise the clothing with their name, it’s an added compliment because it shows that you know who they are! Take care though, don’t get T-shirts printed with Francis if everybody calls him Frank, or spell Robyn as Robin, that just offends people and makes them believe you really don’t know who they are, after all.

For older staff, or to distinguish managers or supervisors from the rest of the workforce, a personalised fleece is fantastic gift – it’s warm, easy to wear and fashionable and can we worn at work over other items of uniform without interfering with the member of staff’s ability to perform their task. Fleeces can be embroidered with a name or initials in the form of a monogram to give them an extra air of luxury.

For hip young things, a personalised hoody is a stunning gift. Hoodies appeal to people in the media and creative industries, where they have almost become a uniform item in the way that shirts and ties are in a more established business field.

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What can you give to every one of your customers this year that they’ll appreciate and use?

A good bag is the ideal early Christmas gift or item of promotional merchandise. Even people who do 99% of their shopping online will find themselves making shopping trips for something, often at the last minutes, and they’ll need a bag to carry their purchases home in.

Equally, this is the time of year when people convey files and other equipment from the office to work on at home over Christmas, and a sturdy bag is the ideal freebie to have given them, because it will encourage them to bless your company and remember your name as they stuff their new acquisition full of whatever it is that they fondly hope they will somehow find time for over the festive season.

So what makes a good bag? A good size, well made and nicely printed are your three criteria. If you want to be truly festive, pick Christmas colours: red, green and white, but remember that a bag that is too clearly Xmas-related may not continue to be used all year round. Make sure that your printed message is large, well-designed and attractive – tiny logos get lost on the side of a bag, and too much big block lettering can look clunky and cheap. Get your designer’s advice because often they know what works best and can help you create a bag design that will appeal to people and work for you for years.

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If you want T-shirts but don’t have the design skills or the budget to produce an image for them, why not use clothes2order to obtain just what you want at a really good price?

We now have a range of the most popular, funny, satirical and cute T-shirts in the world, pre-designed for you and available to order in a range of prices from the absolute bargain to the luxuriously personalised.

The great advantages of this system are several: the cost is the obvious one, but with pre-designed orders there’s also speed to consider and you can choose the colour and style of your T-shirt, hoodie, or whatever to match with your idea of how you want the final garment to look, to end up with a personalised garment that’s also one of the world’s favourite style tops.

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If you’re having T-shirts printed for a works do, or as uniform items, or for sports team wear, there are several things you can do to make sure they are sure fire winners with the people who will be wearing them

When choosing your T-shirt design, consult those who will be wearing the garment you’re ordering – in one case, a small firm ordered T-shirts that turned out to be very unpopular with their staff. In fact, several people refused to wear them. Why? Because the colours chosen looked similar to a local football team, but the staff were supporters of a rival club – wearing the T-shirts, in their minds, made them look like fans of the opposition.

Make sure you understand what your team or staff will be doing in the printed garments you order. Sometimes a collar is more appropriate because people want to look smarter – in that case a printed polo shirt may be more popular than a T-shirt.

Place a small sample order and give them to some people to wear when going about their normal activities. This sometimes reveals that your chosen T-shirt is too short or too long, fits too tightly or too loosely – by choosing a different design or manufacture of T-shirt you can improve the comfort of those wearing it, thus making them much happier with their work or sportswear.

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Promotional activity, of all kinds, is should have three main purposes: creating brand recognition, building customer loyalty and driving up sales. There are many events at which businesses can promote themselves but which they tend to ignore their opportunities – if you attend any form of business meeting where business cards and other information are exchanged, why not give new business contacts a T-shirt with your company details? This will help them remember you, and to focus on your business and its offering to the exclusion of rivals.

You can also use promotional clothing such as T-shirts and hats to reward your work-force and create brand loyalty in people who come into contact with you. Christmas and other festivals are great times to give away promotional clothing to those who clean your offices, or support staff who help your company in other ways. Not only does this drive brand recognition up because they wear the clothing, it also gives them a chance to talk about your company and what it does to the many other people they come into contact with during the course of their working week – in other words they become brand ambassadors in the business environment, all for the cost of a couple of pieces of promotional clothing.

You can also use promotional clothing as a loyalty bonus to regular customers, either when they have used you a certain number of times or as an incentive to buying a certain amount of a product ‘ buy 30 and get a free T-shirt’ can help sway many people to place a larger order than they originally intended, which is an important consideration in times of recession.

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Embroidered clothing covers a wide range of garments and items from polo shirts, T-shirts sweatshirts, hoodies and jackets through to caps and bags.  Embroidery is popular because it durable and easy to launder as well as looking smart and professional.

But for embroidered clothing to achieve everything you hope for, you need to take some care in choosing your supplier, your design and your article to be embroidered.

Choose your supplier with care

When choosing an online supplier, do some research into who owns the website, long they’ve been in business and who else they’ve done work for. Examine the embroidery samples they show on their site and make sure that they match up to your expectations. Ask questions of suppliers because reputable companies will be delighted to demonstrate their expertise and fly-by-night operators will reveal themselves as inadequate in their answers.

Make sure they have an in-house digitiser or a reputable out-source because if you don’t check on this part of the supply chain you can end up finding your exquisite design has been rendered by a person who has little or no design background and may not even have cultural references for what you want to achieve, so they may not recognise words or images that you wish to have processed. Similarly, third parties who complete embroidery work are often late to deliver, so in-house embroidery services mean that deadlines will be met. The shortest number of links in the supply chain means efficiency and reduced costs.

Choose your design with care

Make sure your logo or image is simple and colourful.  Graduation is impossible in embroidered threads so you need to ensure your design has block colour. Also make sure the design works across all media such as letterhead, clothing and other promotional items without needing modification.

If you are using text, make sure it’s not too small to be easily read, and if you have large areas of blankness, consider how you can revise the artwork so that there aren’t big expensive areas to be filled in with embroidery that will then look bulky rather than elegant.

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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.

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Where is the recession hitting hardest? Houses, cars and … weddings.

Sad but true. Today’s bride and groom are having to count every penny and weigh every decision – is it best to spend X amount on the wedding or save some money on that expenditure and put it towards a future shared life?

The weekend flights to Berlin: off-road racing; paintballing and visiting lapdancing clubs type stag nights are looking less attractive to the lads, when a coach trip to Blackpool or Brighton, a fish and chip supper and a night touring the clubs can deliver the same adrenaline rush and hangover, for less than half the price.

And for the lasses on a hen night, the three day cruise with a night in Barcelona has given way to the train to town, an afternoon’s spa pampering and a top musical, before dancing the night away.

Many couples are also choosing differently when it comes to their stag and hen night clothing. But it’s a paradox. Where before they used to spend very little and go for throw-away clothing, now they are investing more in good quality T-shirts or even, for winter weddings, top-of-the-line sweatshirts for men, with elegant printing or even an embroidered monogram linking the bride and groom’s initials.

The reason is simple – they want the stag and hen night T-shirts or sweatshirts to be a quality gift and a lasting memento of their great day. And their friends want to keep this clothing to remember the fantastic time they had, even if it was on a budget.

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It’s not just catwalk models and footballers who can earn a fortune wearing T-shirts. Jason Sadler of Florida, has found a way to earn money and promote his Iwearyourshirt.com business.

The concept was very simple – he decided that he would wear a different T-shirt every day for 365 days starting on 1 January 2009. The first T-shirt he would wear he would wear for just a dollar from the supplier, the second day’s T-shirt would ‘cost’ 2 dollars (plus a free T-shirt of course) and so on until the end of the year when he would earn $365 for his 31 December T-shirt.

Of course there had to be publicity to make his idea work, so he wears the T-shirt all day and his activities: working, shopping, meeting friends, appear on  ustream.tv, Twitter, facebook and other social media. Now he’s planning his 2010 ‘living calendar’ and already has advance bookings for 163 days of the year – and he’s doubled his prices!

He says his girlfriend has refused to go out with him on days when he’s wearing a really ugly T-shirt, and that he’s sending his 365 T-shirts from 2009 to an Africa charity.

So how do other businesses convert this idea to their needs – how about getting dogs at a local rehoming shelter to wear your promotional products – each day they are filmed you pay a tiny fee and they feature on Youtube – good for them, good for you, good for business! Or perhaps a local athlete could be persuaded to wear your gear for a year, or maybe a class of school students could wear a T-shirt to destruction by passing it around the class and seeing how many days it could be washed and worn before falling apart … or seem which of them could make their personalised schoolbag last the longest … there are a thousand ways this kind of ‘viral’ approach could be used to promote businesses.

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