In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the end user’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s fingers close to the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must ensure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will want 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 enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you want for sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be higher off in case you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion usually are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should enable not less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and will begin marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. Nonetheless, should you wait to start out marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the very least a few additional weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge starts whenever you hand off all the photos, 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 completed product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner when you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should probably permit a little bit further time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
