In planning any calendar printing mission, 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 is not in the end user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s palms close to the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or other event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, however remember that you will be higher off should you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to allow at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should be sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar undertaking – you may and should begin marketing during the planning and production levels of the mission. Nonetheless, should you wait to start marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the very least a few further weeks, perhaps extra, for your advertising message to achieve the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing venture starts when you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely enable a little bit further time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
