The Redbows Promotional Gifts Blog

How do you save costs when it comes to promotional gifts? The easiest way without sacrificing quality is to examine your imprint closely. The higher the number of colours used, the higher the print costs. The lowest cost print method is screen printing and this is the norm used for the majority of printed promotional products. With screen printing, each colour is applied separately. The higher the number of colours, the higher the number of origination charges (and processes) required to apply the colours. So look closely at your logo and see if it can be reproduced as a single colour. Most Artwork Design Studios will be able to generate a positive or negative version of your logo (using a single colour) and this will give the most-economic print pricing for your promotional gifts.

When we quote lead times for promotional items these are always from the approved artwork stage of the ordering process. If any stage can cause a delay in delivery, this is it and to help improve our customer service we introduced an ‘in-house’ Design Studio at Redbows last year. This has helped our customers tremendously and we get rave reviews from them post sale – see the comments from our customer satisfaction surveys.

So, what is the actual problem? Well we have access to millions of pounds worth of printing equipment for the various processes and products but without suitable artwork they simply do not run. Delays typically occur at the artwork stage for various reasons: (1) no artwork exists and our design team has to generate it from scratch, (2) there are several people/clients involved in the artwork sign off stage, (3) we need to turn the artwork into a suitable vector file, and finally (4) where numerous amendments are made to the artwork resulting in several approval forms being generated.

Of them all (3) is the easiest for us to solve rapidly and (1) typically takes a couple of hours in design time. (2) however is another matter, and for this all we can offer is a professional design service that responds to your inputs, and (4) well as you can imagine this can be a nightmare, and costly.

So, how can you get your gifts quickly ? Let us help you get your artwork right first time! 

What is our advice on what to put in a promotional gift’s imprint area ? Keep it simple. The basics often suffice and we recommend, logo, web address, phone number and marketing message. It all depends on how big the print area actually is and the number of them. For example, pens have print areas on the barrel and clips. Why is less more ? Well when you have a small imprint area, you may only be able to get all the information in using a very small font. Here the problems of readability and ink flow arise.  Think about your clients and their age range (for this read ability to view without glasses). Make what you print as big as possible, so that anyone can read it. Make the font too small and the ‘ink’ can bleed into the non-print areas. If in doubt you can always ask our Design Studio for a virtual visual and even order a pre-production sample.