In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t ultimately user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s palms close to the start of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may 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 venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but understand that you may be higher off if you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event usually are not what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to permit at the least two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must remember to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you may and will begin advertising through the planning and production phases of the venture. However, in case you wait to begin advertising till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit a minimum of a few extra weeks, maybe more, to your marketing message to achieve the meant viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge begins when you hand off the entire photographs, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable a bit additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
