0
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.
The Korea Times has revealed that in Seoul, there are concerns about dress codes in the workplace. A local survey of 578 recruitment officials revealed that complaints about ‘ugly’ workplace clothing are quite different to the ones that might be seen in the West – topping the list of unpopular garments are miniskirts and low-cut dresses!
After that, men wearing V-neck shirts that show their chests are considered the most offensive to colleagues. And third on the list: see-through clothes. Amazing. It’s a whole new insight to the world of Korean offices.
Fourth on the list of unpleasantness: unwashed garments – because they make the place smell bad. Fifth, slippers with bare feet (do they mean sandals, perhaps, or are the Korean office workers actually turning up in their fluffy footwear?) and eighth – sleeveless shirts or dresses.
If this sounds amazingly trendy – don’t forget that Korean Air had its 1990s uniform designed by the late Gianfranco Ferré. And if you get told off for wearing your bunny slippers to work, say they do it in Korea!
At a time when the ‘double dip’ is being talked about as a real possibility, recession-wise, it may seem odd to be advocating a uniform as a money-saving, and maybe even money-earning, measure, but there are four reasons that investing in a staff uniform can save money and may actually boost business.
1. Health and Safety – there are many reasons why wearing a uniform can save a business money and safety is the main one: investing in proper footwear, specially designed clothing such as overalls or aprons and carefully chosen accessories like toolbelts, caps or gloves can mean that there are many fewer accidents which not only means less time off work with injuries but is a major force in avoiding compensation and injury claims from disgruntled employees who’ve harmed themselves in the workplace.
2. Pocket money – literally! These days, when every penny counts, people love to be able to wear a workplace-provided uniform as it means that they don’t have to wear their own clothes in the workplace and that means they save money!
3. Productivity – people wearing uniforms tend to waste less time in the staff toilets, checking themselves out in the mirrors – a US based time and motion study found that uniform wearing retail staff worked, on average, 27 minutes more in a day than those in their own clothing.
4. Team building – when individuals are dressed alike, they become a team – that’s schools give children a vest to pull over their normal clothing when they are playing a team sport. Similarly, when people in the workplace are all dressed alike, even if it’s only the same printed T-shirt, they will identify as a team and be more committed to team goals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dublin might always have been green, but it’s green in a very specific way for the next week or so – ‘Fashion Evolution’, set up by the Re-dress collective. Celebrating ethical fashion, Re-dress is inviting ordinary shoppers and fashionistas to ‘re-dress’ sustainability, ethics and environmental issues in the clothing and apparel sector.
For many businesses, purchasing ethical clothing is central to their mission statement. Concerns such as Fair Trade, environmental protection and supply chain have driven many companies to review their uniform choices and avoid reputational issues by investing in organic and fair-trade clothing.
In addition, new forms of business reporting focus increasingly on value and less on cost – this means that the reputation of companies who exploit third world labour or pollute ecosystems by using damaging processes to create promotional clothing, are devalued.
The alternative, promotional organic clothing, markets a brand in an ethical and effective way – it tells a good story about a company and means there is no dirt to be found, no matter how deep a journalist digs. Today, organic cotton T-shirts demonstrate a company’s green credentials without costing more than the standard issue version.
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