In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not ultimately user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s hands close to the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or different event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however remember that you will be better off when you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to allow at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to make sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar challenge – you can and will begin advertising through the planning and production stages of the project. However, when you wait to begin advertising until you will have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the least a few extra weeks, maybe extra, to your marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking starts if you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a bit of additional time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
