In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t ultimately consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s fingers near the beginning of college if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you need for sales is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or other occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be better off for those who can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must enable not less than two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it’s best to be sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and should begin marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the challenge. However, when you wait to begin marketing till you will have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit not less than a couple of extra weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising message to achieve the meant audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge starts when you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably enable a little bit extra time – possibly a month in total – for production.
