In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to concentrate 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 isn’t ultimately user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands close to the beginning of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may need and factor it in.
If, however, 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 difficult. How much time you need for gross sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local pageant or different event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but take into account that you will be higher off in case you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to allow not less than two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to make sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and should begin advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. However, in case you wait to begin marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit no less than a number of additional weeks, maybe more, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge starts when you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability permit a bit of additional time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
