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Increase Sales & Awareness

Promotional products are designed to increase awareness and business. You use them to reward, remind and inspire, both internally to employees and externally to customers and prospects. The thousands of products available allow flexibility in planning promotions.

Promotional products usually bear a logo, slogan or saying, known as the imprint. There are many different ways a product can be imprinted, depending on the material from which it is made. Some common methods of imprinting include printing, screenprinting, embossing, embroidery, hot stamping, pad printing, etching, engraving, die-casting, etc. The message itself can be as simple as a company logo or as complex as a mission statement. Because promotional products are generally purchased in quantities, they usually cost less than the recipient thinks they do, giving them a higher perceived value.

There is really no limit to the type of product that can be used to communicate a message. Products include calendars, mugs, pens, T-shirts, bumper stickers, key tags, etc. Today, there are literally hundreds of thousands of promotional products at our store, including many high-value items like clocks, crystal, china and watches. Additionally, automotive accessories and desktop products are very popular.

One reason promotional products work is because people actually like to receive these gifts. Unlike other marketing and motivational media, promotional products, which include ad specialties, premiums, business gifts and recognition awards - are tangible symbols. They are useful to the recipient, they are kept, used and appreciated long after other elements of a campaign may have been discarded or forgotten.

Industry Terms

Decorating Terms

Debossing: depressing an image into a material’s surface so that the image sits below the product surface

Embossing: impressing an image in relief to achieve a raised surface

Hot Stamp: setting a design on a relief die, which is then heated and pressed onto the printing surface

Laser or Foil Stamp: applying metallic or colored foil imprints to vinyl, leather or paper surfaces

Personalization: imprinting an item with a person's name using one of several methods such as mechanical engraving, laser engraving, hot stamping, debossing, sublimation, or screen printing, to name a few.

Die-casting: injecting molten metal into the cavity of a carved die (a mold)

Die-striking: producing emblems and other flat promotional products by striking a blank metal sheet with a hammer that holds the die

Etching: using a process in which an image is first covered with a protective coating that resists acid, then exposed, leaving bare metal and protected metal. The acid attacks only the exposed metal, leaving the image etched onto the surface.

Engraving: cutting an image into metal, wood or glass by one of three methods--computerized engraving, hand tracing, or hand engraving.

Pantone Matching System: (PMS) a book of standardized color in a fan format used to identify, match and communicate colors in order to produce accurate color matches in printing. Each color has a coded number indicating instructions for mixing inks to achieve that color.

Colorfill: screen printing an image and then debossing it onto the vinyl’s surface

Embroidery: stitching a design into fabric through the use of high-speed, computer-controlled sewing machines. Artwork must first be "digitized," which is the specialized process of converting two-dimensional artwork into stitches or thread. A particular format of art such as a jpeg, tif, eps, or bmp, cannot be converted into an embroidery tape. The digitizer must actually recreate the artwork using stitches. Then it programs the sewing machine to sew a specific design, in a specific color, with a specific type of stitch. This is the process known as digitizing.

Printing Terms

Screen Printing: an image is transferred to the printed surface by ink, which is pressed through a stenciled screen and treated with a light-sensitive emulsion. Film positives are put in contact with the screens and exposed to light, hardening the emulsion not covered by film and leaving a soft area on the screen for the squeegee to press ink through. (Also called silk screening)

Pad Printing: a recessed surface is covered with ink. The plate is wiped clean, leaving ink in the recessed areas. A silicone pad is then pressed against the plate, pulling the ink out of the recesses, and pressing it directly onto the product.

4-color Process: a system where a color image is separated into 4 different color values by the use of filters and screens (usually done digitally). The result is a color separation of 4 images, that when transferred to printing plates and printed on a printing press with the colored inks cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow and black, reproduces the original color image. These four colors can be combined to create thousands of colors.

Camera-ready: artwork that is black and white and has very clean, crisp lines that make it easy to scan and suitable for photographic reproduction.

Bleeds: printers cannot print right to the edge of a paper sheet. To create that effect, the printer must use a sheet, which is larger than the document size. Then the printer prints beyond the edge of the document size (usually 1/8”), then cuts the paper down to the document size.

Imprint Area: the area on a product, with specific dimensions, in which the imprint is placed.

Artwork Terms

Mechanical artwork: the traditional standard for acceptable mechanical artwork that is “camera-ready black and white” material.

Electronic/Digital Artwork

Vector files: sometimes called a geometric file, most images created with tools such as Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw are in the form of vector image files. Vector image files are easier to modify than raster image files (which can, however, sometimes be reconverted to vector files for further refinement)

Bitmap files: images are exactly what their name says they are: a collection of bits that form an image. The image consists of a matrix of individual dots (or pixels) that all have their own color (described using bits, the smallest possible units of information for a computer).

Page Layout Documents: the font files and document preferences that need to be supplied for use on the supplier’s operating system.

Metafile: a collection of structures that store a picture in a device-independent format. Device independence is the one feature that sets metafiles apart from bitmaps. Unlike a bitmap, a metafile guarantees device independence. There is a drawback to metafiles, because they are generally drawn more slowly than bitmaps. Therefore, if an application requires fast drawing and device independence is not an issue, it should use bitmaps instead of metafiles.

Adobe® Portable Document Format: (PDF) files preserve the visually rich content of original files, and are easier to read than HTML content that appears in a Web browser. Adobe PDF files print cleanly and quickly, and anyone can share Adobe PDF files, regardless of their platform or software application.

TIFF: (Tagged Image File Format) file a file format for exchanging bitmapped images (usually scans) between applications.

EPS: (encapsulated postscript) file an alternative picture file format that allows PostScript data to be stored and edited and is easy to transfer between Macintosh, MSDOS and other systems.

PostScript: a computer description language that allows a programmer to create complex pages using a series of commands.

Other Industry Terms

Paper proof: Impression of type or artwork on paper so the correctness and quality of the material to be printed can be checked. The least expensive is a regular black and white faxed paper proof.

Pre-production Proof: an actual physical sample of the product itself produced and sent for approval before an order goes into production.

Drop Shipment: an order shipped to more than one location will be charged a fee for each additional destination.

Production Time: the amount of time needed to produce and ship an order, once an order has been received and approved. Stock products with a one-color imprint usually ship within 10-12 working days. Custom products and those with multi-color imprints require longer production time.

Overruns/Underruns: the number of pieces that were printed in excess of the quantity specified/the production run of fewer pieces than the amount specified.