In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s arms close to the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the whole venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you will be higher off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should not what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should allow not less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it is best to be sure you develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you can and will begin advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. Nonetheless, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at least a couple of additional weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all the photographs, textual content, 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 finished product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should probably permit a bit of further time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.