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Become a custom shirt sponsor

Say that you have a business and you would like to get your name out into the community. How can you accomplish that?

You can advertise. Of course that gets pretty expensive when you do lots of it. Newspapers used to be the only game in town for businesses that could not afford radio and TV. A main drawback of ads, especially for small businesses on tight budgets, is that ads often end up in the trash. Message gone. Out of sight, out of mind.

Promotional giveaways are a great alternative to traditional advertising. If the product is useful, like apparel or mouse pads or the trusty calendar, your company name stays in view.

One relatively low-cost way to both advertise and help support entities within your community is to sponsor a fund-raising effort. Here’s how that works:

You would fully or partially finance the printing of, say, 100 t-shirts. Somewhere on the t-shirt there would be a special place for your logo and possibly a slogan.

The rest of the shirt would be printed with the text, graphics, or photos of the entity doing the fund-raising. They would benefit from your picking up the printing costs. They would then sell the shirts and make money for their organization.

As a sponsor, you would get a tax wrte-off. You would also get name recognition from what was printed on the shirt along with recognition that you helped sponsor an organization. Earning a reputation for giving back to the community is a great way to promote your own business as you help another group raise funds. Win-win!

At Creativity On we frequently put together apparel and products where one business entity helps promote a cause or a charity. While it’s usually the charity that approaches the sponsor, we would be happy to help potential sponsors find worthy causes to support.

Promotional products that keep selling

A well-meaning businesswoman thought it would be a great idea for her company to buy a thousand bottles of water to be handed out during a summer festival. The bottles were affixed with labels that included the company branding.

From a “nice neighbor” point of view, free water was a kind gesture to make to the community of thirsty festival patrons. Yet from a promotional products viewpoint, and the intent was promotion, what’s wrong with this picture?

What happens when someone finishes a bottle of water? Right, it gets tossed into the trash… along with all that branding.

A major consideration of an effective promotional item is longevity. How long will it continue promoting? Would the amount of money spent on bottled water be better spent on t-shirts, caps, visors, pens, mugs, or something else?

A good promotional product gets used and seen a lot. An embroidered hat gets lot of use, and each time it’s worn it advertises your business. The same thing holds true for an attractive t-shirt.

Our latest favorite is a printed mouse pad. They measure 9×7.5 inches and we can print any full color graphic on them. Mouse pads are constantly used and seen. Mouse pads come in different thicknesses including thin ones for travel and laptop use.

We will be happy to discuss your options and promotional strategies. Give us a call at (503) 365-1955.

Sue and Steve Show dot com

Sue and Steve Soucy from Vancouver, British Columbia created the Sue and Steve Show with the expressed intention of becoming millionaires on the Internet. They're doing it through a combination of home-made videos that they post online, Internet marketing tools and strategies, and coaching programs they created distilled from top names in Internet marketing.

They have an unusually charming, honest, and down-to-earth style. They're two nice people who struck Josh as folks you'd want to have as friends as well as coaches. (Steve is edgier than Sue, but both have great big hearts and are extremely positive personalities.)

Josh is just completing Sue and Steve's first coaching program, the Sue and Steve Experience, which is one reason why you'll soon be seeing significant improvements in Creativity On's web presence. You can see more about Sue and Steve here (seems to take about 20 seconds to load, but it's worth the wait.) They're also all over Facebook and Twitter.

Sue and Steve represent another aspect of where we all are in time: nowadays virtually anybody can have their own TV show on the Internet and reach thousands of people. This is an incredibly exciting development for small business owners and entrepreneurs. You can have your say however you want to say it and you can handle it all yourself without any media control freaks messing with your message.

At Creativity On we can help with branding. If you have a logo in an ai (Adobe Illustrator) or eps (encapsulated postscript) file format stored on your computer, you are halfway to having a great t-shirt made. Those two formats are vector files, and the great thing about vector files is that you can shrink or enlarge the graphic without any loss in quality.

The Sue and Steve shirt Josh is wearing shows how digital garment printing differs from screen printing. The graphic features gradient color blends (colour for you Canadians) in the golds and blues of the logo. No can do with screen printing.

Thinking of having a photo shirt made?

When you’re thinking about having a photo t-shirt made, here are some important reminders about what we need to achieve best results for you.

The photo should be of the highest quality possible in the size that you wish to print. So, if you want the print to come out 10 inches wide by 8 inches tall, the photo file you send us should measure that size.

Don’t know how big your photo is or what resolution it is? We can quickly tell you. We can also tell you that if the file size of the photo you email us is way less than 500kb, it’s most likely going to be less than great.

Alternatively, if you have access to Photoshop, load up a file and check it out through the Image>Image Size command. In the box that comes up you’ll see the image size and the resolution. We look for 300dpi(dots per inch). (Don’t be tempted to just change the resolution to get 300dpi output if you’re not dramatically reducing the picture size at the same time. It won’t work. You’ll get lessened quality.)

We can usually downsize photos without any problem. The problem comes when you want to enlarge something. Some people assume that they can send us a photo they take off the web and that we can enlarge it to t-shirt printing size. Usually we can’t!

If you take original photographs, set your digital camera to take the highest resolution photos. Some cameras let you shoot in 300dpi; others don’t. Just set your camera for high resolution and it will probably turn out just fine. A photo that shows up as shot in 72dpi but that is like 32-inch wide will downsize into a nice 10” wide, 300dpi photo in Photoshop.

If this technology talk doesn’t make sense to you, just go back to that rule of thumb that if the size of the photo you want printed is much less than half a megabyte (500kb) for a 10-inch wide printed photo, it’s probably going to be a problem.

If that’s the case, we have a couple of solutions. One is to scan a hard copy photo (a print) at the desired print size at 300dpi. In other words, enlarge the photo using your scanner. In this case you'll be making a whole new source file.

A second solution is to turn the poor quality photo into a work of art using a filter in an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter. This can create a very pleasing effect that in many cases can improve the image quality for printing.

Printed t-shirts for all occasions

Here is a sample of a direct-to-garment printed t-shirt idea. Printed shirts of a home for sale!

I bring this to your attention for several reasons. One is that with DTG printing, unlike screen printing, you have access to millions of colors. This photo and the accompanying graphics print beautifully.

The second is the idea of using t-shirts as a promotional medium. It's a great way to attract attention, especially if it's something people are not used to seeing on a shirt. It's the purple cow concept that Seth Godin made famous--you don't expect to see a purple cow or a t-shirt showing off a house for sale.

And third, we can make t-shirts out of many of the photos or graphics you may already have stored on your computer.

We are happy to answer your questions about digital garment printing and offer suggestions on how you can make the impact you want.

Save money on your embroidery

When you have your company logo (or any other artwork) digitized for embroidery, we can use that one file to produce different looks. The same embroidery file was used to render the above two garments. By changing the thread color and of course by the different fabric colors of the garment, we can achieve different appearances.

We are always here to answer your questions and give you suggestions on your embroidery and garment printing projects.