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Rainbow coloured flags? A massive parade? More Lady Gaga tunes than you could shake a stick at?! Yes that’s right, this bank holiday weekend saw Manchester Pride descend on the city centre. The annual event aims to promote gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights and equality. While I happened to be wondering around the city centre and enjoying the parade, I was reminded by an order that we had here at clothes2order.com that I thought might be of interest to you all. The order came from the London Frontrunners.
The Frontrunners is a running club for gay men, lesbians and gay friendly people who love running. For the seventh year in a row they were organising ‘Pride Run 2010′ down in London. The aim of the run is to bring straight and gay/lesbian people together through sport as well as to raise money for various charities. Having just started with 200 runners taking part, the event now boasts over 1000 competitors with more than £23,000 having being raised for charity to date.
The Frontrunners were looking for their design to be printed on T-shirts, so after a Google search they found clothes2order. Impressed by the price and variety of products they placed an order and got a product that they were happy with. A big congratulations to all that took part in the event, especially to the London Frontrunner who managed the 10km course in 35 minutes 51 seconds (far too quick for my liking!).
Thank you to Martin for answering all my questions, we hope to hear from you and the London Frontrunners again soon!
With the econo
my how it is, there is no shame in not having a job at the moment. Most seem to be ‘career planning’, ‘weighing up their options’ or at the very least a ‘freelance facebooker’ (aren‘t we all?!). If only we could we could all invent dream jobs for ourselves!
Enter Jason Sadler or as Fox Business dubbed him ‘Entrepreneur of the Century’. With his salary in excess of $80,000 a year and a job description of ‘wear some printed t-shirts’, I feel that title might just be justified.
‘How the heck does he do it?!’
To put it simply, Jason Sadler’s body is for sale.…well, his torso at least. By putting his chest on sale to any business, charity or freelance facebooker that wants it, he offers to become their living and breathing billboard for one day of the year.
Jason Sadler has managed to create a cost effective marketing strategy which firms are willing to take a risk on. By wearing a promo t-shirt all day and writing about it to his facebook friends and twitter followers, a company’s logo can be exposed to potential customers. Jason even posts videos on youtube and holds webinars via his website (http://iwearyourshirt.com/) to inform people about the company that temporarily owns his chest. With over 17,000 followers on twitter, and 7,000 on facebook, he offers a business a new and innovative solution to social media coverage.
The power of a promo t-shirt has really gone global!
The demand for Sadler’s body and cheeky smile has been so great that he has had to employ someone to help him wear all those t-shirts. Sadler admits that his dream is to have to do nothing at all, but rather pay other people to do all the ‘hard work’ for him. His search for new recruits might be explained by him having to wear printed t-shirt 365 days a year and to any event, including weddings and funerals.
What the case of Jason Sadler proves is that companies are constantly looking for new ways to be innovative with their marketing strategies. By taking the hallmark of many companies PR strategies, the promotional t-shirt, and giving it a fresh twist, has Jason Sadler managed to create a job to make you all green with envy?
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.
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.
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?
What Is Transfer Printing?
Transfer printing allows the conversion of a high resolution image – maybe a photograph, line-art or painting – onto transfer paper. Unlike home transfer printing, the commercial quality transfer paper creates a much more detailed image of higher quality. While images can be printed form a wide range of formats such BMP, Tif Gif and Jpeg, the final result is more dependant on the quality of the original image than on anything else which means that the quality of the original is essential to getting a good garment result. Using a commercial heat press and silicone release paper, the image is then transferred to a garment.
What Are Its Advantages?
Transfer printing is both fast and low in price.
It’s a good way of getting hold of small numbers of printed garments like T-shirts
There is no limit to the number of print colours.
What Can It Be Used For?
Transfer printing is ideal if you have a school competition for which you want T-shirts – schools have used this service to create portrait T-shirts for debating clubs or for inter-house competitions or to commemorate a sporting success by having a team photo printed rapidly onto a small quantity of celebratory long-sleeved T-shirts to give to the team players.
It’s also ideal for printing short run items for workplace promotions. Several companies have an ‘employee of the month’ campaign which includes items like printed aprons or other items of work clothing, which are given to the winning team.
The Drawbacks To Transfer Printing
Transfer printing can only take place onto white fabric.
Many companies, or even colleges, end up as brands. Laurie Essig, over at True Slant, is bemoaning the way the college she attended, Franklin and Marshall, has become one of the most wanted casual clothing brands in Europe and Japan, without the actual clothing line having anything to do with the college at all!
At the same time, HMV are hoping to turn around a declining market share by creating an ‘entertainment-inspired’ clothing range that launches in June. The line will feature rock and film imagery on music themed T-shirts aimed at the 18-30 male market and checked shirts and scarves for ‘festival-chic’ women. It’s the spearhead of a strategy that will move the company away from its traditional lines of CDs and DVDs into more ‘lifestyle’ sales.
So while your business might not seem to lend itself to establishing a strong clothing brand, it’s worth considering if the next Caterpillar boots trend or the rapidly building craze for cowboy hats could launch from, or help support, your business. There’s a current desire for retro style aprons which any catering or hardware company could tap into, by creating branded pinnys for sale. And skinny leg jeans are being supported by husky work shirts, which is a great chance for engineering and trade businesses to put their workforce into fashionable uniforms that can also be sold or given to clients as a goodwill gesture.
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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
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