Not all the changes in the promotional products industry relate to actual products. New technologies are starting to make their way into our industry as well.

The neatest thing I have seen lately is the new concept of order portals from companies like Creative Merchandise, LLC, based in California.

Client Order Portals are custom web ordering platforms to make ordering promotional items even easier as they allow companies like ours to display our client’s logos on actual in stock merchandise in real time.

Why is that green? The number one question we get is how is a logo going to look on X item.

In the far past the only way to address this question was to develop a spec sample, i.e to run one item to serve as a sample for the hundreds of, say, coffee mugs to follow. Today we often run .pdf proofs instead of spec samples, but there are still thousands of spec samples being done in our industry.

The problem is that to run something even as simple as one mug spec sample is the same process as running 10,000 mugs. We use the same big machines, same screens, same setup but all that work and energy produce only one item.

It is like using a bulldozer to plant a single flower bulb in your front yard.

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