In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not ultimately consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s arms near the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for all the mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must be sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but keep in mind that you may be higher off in the event you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow not less than two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it’s best to be sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar project – you can and will start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow not less than a couple of additional weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely permit a little extra time – possibly a month in total – for production.
