This weekend sees the start of the annual Printwear & Promotion Exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham (Sunday 2nd to Tuesday 4th March).
It is a time when all the brands and suppliers get together under one roof and people plod along the aisles with carrier bags full of promotional clothing catalogues, samples and free biros. We didn’t go last year (in fact I had a bit of a rant on this blog about it) and we are not planning to go this year (and Sunday is Mother’s Day too!).
To all our friends who are going - enjoy - we’ll see you sometime soon.
Published by Alex 2 months, 2 weeks ago
in London.
The Light is a great bar & restaurant between Liverpool Street Station and Shoreditch in London. It is walking distance from the Indigo office and a popular watering hole for our staff. This big, old building with high ceilings, built in 1893 and a former power station is an historic landmark. It is the first building that you see in Hackney when you approach from the City and as such it separates two very different areas. Now a 53 storey tower block is proposed – threatening 233 Shoreditch High Street with demolition.
A campaign has been set up to save the place called “Save the Light” and you can sign the online petition. OPEN Shoreditch also has a blog which explains more about the proposed developments.
Indigo recently completed a rush job for Kensington Palace (part of Historic Royal Palaces) consisting of Fruit of the Loom Long sleeve Valueweight t-shirts with a one colour front and one colour back screen print as part of their ‘Kids go free‘ campaign. It seems the client was very happy with our service too:
To: Jo Myronidis
Subject: Re: Client approval attached
Super Turnaround. They look the business. We will definitely call on you in the future. Hopefully not in such a rush…
Happy St. Valentine’s day!
Maureen
Historic Royal Palaces
Hi, I’m Lizi and I have recently joined the Client Services Team here at Indigo Clothing.
I am fresh out of university this summer and after a festival or three I succumbed to the reality that I do in fact have to work for a living. With that in mind I worked as an in house recruiter for a consultancy company as well as working for Xfm radio station. I’m known for my gig-going and dressing room crashing amongst my friends, I love live music and I’m always at gigs.
Indigo Clothing is a fun and friendly workplace where I have been trained up by the finest ‘Alpha Male’ in all the land. Steph and everyone else has been a great help and made me feel part of the team.
A foggy, cold Monday morning in London today and the Waterloo and City line was packed with Gore-Tex ski-jackets. A tourist may have been forgiven for thinking he/she was in Chamonix rather than on a commuter train full of people in the financial services industry!
Today is start of London Fashion Week. Maybe some of the colours on the catwalk this week will filter down into the promotional clothing world in the next few years!
Also today, Matt Attlee, our inhouse web developer leaves Indigo to travel to Japan and Australia. We wish him all the best and we are left to admire his fantastic contribution to the WordPress merchandise store and to Indigo-2’s various clients. Rob Allen from Unearth Travel joins us for a month to lead development on our internal web-application, codenamed ICOMS.
The web team over at Indigo-2 have been giving the Indigo Clothing site a bit of a Spring clean recently. The catalogue design was four years old and whilst it worked and looked nice, I decided it was time that everything was given a facelift. Not all the changes are in place yet, this is a rolling update, but once it is all done I hope you’ll agree that it was a worthwhile improvement! These are the main key changes:
Wider: The site was originally designed for 800 x 600 screen resolutions but with the larger monitor now a common feature across the land we have increased the page width to 979px which works nicely with the larger 1024 x 768 resolution. What this means for you is less page scrolling because we can get more information on each page ‘above-the-fold‘.
Colour Palette: Our colour palette has always been a simple mix of purple, green, grey and white but we have had a close look at all elements on the page and come up with a mix that is fresher and cleaner than before, with more green for emphasis, such as the cool new ‘view’ buttons on the homepage (see above).
Product Catalogue: Now 2008 is here, there are plenty of new products, prices, colours and images available in the promotional clothing market. Everyday we are updating and adding to the catalogue so by the end of the month we’ll have no broken images or other cobwebs.
Quote Calculator: Each product page has always had a screen printing and embroidery quote calculator. These have previously been on separate pages from the product details page but now, using the magic of server-side scripting and AJAX (not a bathroom cleaning product but stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), these will be displayed in full interactive glory on the right of each product. This new feature will be launched next week.
Spring Offers: To celebrate the fact that the days are getting longer and the outside is getting warmer, we have got some great Spring offers to celebrate - check out the homepage for more details.
Alpha Mummy, a blog on Times Online, has a good post entitled, 25 most offensive children’s T-shirts with links to the product pages. The comments are as interesting as the post itself - it seems there is a bit of controversy over whether kids should be seen in these tees, which sport slogans such, “I’m gonna be hot,” through to “iPood.”
Indigo Clothing offer a range of children’s t-shirts which can be customised with slogans.
CityAM, the free London financial newspaper, that is jammed in ones face most mornings by an over-zealous, anoraked vendor at every tube and rail station in this city, has a good article about bespoke suits. I agree with the author that these are special items and once you have had a bespoke suit, going back to off-the-peg is tough!
It made me think though that the same applies to staff uniform. Make sure you don’t just give you staff matching gear (for example, many bar staff wear plain black t-shirts or blouses), make sure it is bespoke to your company, over-branded with screen printing or embroidery to best present your brand or promotion.
Also, if you are interested in bespoke suits, check out our friends at English Cut.
Published by Alex 3 months ago
in Fun.
What do people like on their pancakes? We thought about this after Darsh mentioned on the phone last night she likes peanut butter, ice-cream and dolly mixtures?!
So here are our favs:
Jo - Old skool lemon and sugar.
Steph (alpha male) - Protein shake added to batter mix!
Lizi - Grated milk and white chocolate!
Matt - Lemon and sugar.
Ed - Refused to play our silly little games.
Opal - Strawberries and cream and maybe syrup.
Alex - Sugar.
Travelling back from our ‘work outing’ in Nottingham this Sunday without my usual trashy girls mags, I was forced to read Stephan’s ‘boys’ publications, Men’s Health and Front. Amongst other facts for the lads, I came across this picture of Matt Helders, of Arctic Monkeys, wearing a t-shirt about CMYK colours!
A similar shirt is available to purchase from a great site called www.ebtm.com, standing for Everything but the Music, priced at £20.00.
