In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers near the start of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be better off if you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should permit at least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it’s best to make sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you can and may start marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit at the least a couple of further weeks, maybe extra, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture begins when you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable slightly additional time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
