In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t ultimately person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s palms near the beginning of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, however, you propose 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 a lot time you want for gross sales depends upon your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local competition or different occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you’ll be better off when you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must enable at least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar project – you can and will begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and production levels of the challenge. However, if you happen to wait to start out advertising and marketing until you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at the least a few extra weeks, maybe more, for your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. 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 completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably allow slightly further time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
