In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the long run user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might 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 consumer’s fingers near the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the whole challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will want and issue 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 little more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales depends on your sales technique. Are you selling at a local festival or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be higher off if you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to be sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the overall period of the calendar project – you’ll be able to and should begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the challenge. However, in the event you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit not less than a couple of additional weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising message to reach the supposed audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing mission starts if you hand off the entire pictures, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable a little further time – possibly a month in total – for manufacturing.
