What gets you excited? I bet it isn’t your newly printed letterheads or a fistful of pristine compliment slips. Yet for every business stationery has one of the most important responsibilities when it comes to representing your brand and your values.
Finding a competitively priced supplier who can provide you with stationery that is both functional and of a consistent quality can be a minefield.
In order to maintain your brand across all stationery, you often need to take a good hard look at where you are now, and then once you have assessed your entire stationery suite – including forms, letter headings, compliment slips, business cards – you may decide it’s best to start again with a fresh approach.
Check out these easy steps to get the most for your budget and deliver the best quality for less – so saving your company money.
1. Consider paper carefully – do you honestly know what paper you are using at the moment? What Shade, weight, opaqueness – brand? Most business stationery suppliers will drive you towards ‘Conqueror’ in the same way as most people consider a ‘Hoover’ to be synonymous with a vacuum cleaner. Conqueror is just a paper brand. Look at other options, there is a plethora of different papers available to choose from, nearly all of which are more cost effective than Conqueror and of an identical quality.
2. How is your brand printed? Are there spot colours? What are the Pantones? Will the printing be four colour process or digital? Depending on your brand guidelines, we need to consider the most appropriate print process for your usage, logo and paper to give best value for your money, as well as delivering the quality you need. Often different items are printed in different ways on different papers and end up looking completely unrelated to each other, not a look you want to embrace for that Corporate Stationery appearance.
3. Ordering – Let’s be honest, there are few innovations in this part of print – what you need from corporate stationery is consistency, price and quality. Is it worth buying from a different supplier every time you need it? No! Not when you factor in the variations and inconsistencies you are likely to get from chopping and changing. A great way to get more out of your budget is to work on a fixed price ordering system. A good print supplier will offer you a fixed price for 12 months; an outstanding print supplier will have an online portal where in a few clicks your order is complete and you can focus on the rest of your day.
We have developed our online portal (read more) over the last 5 years to provide this service – print doesn’t need to be difficult, but some suppliers make it so to protect their interests. If you want to know more about our online ordering system see here or for a demo click here.
4. How much you order – Consider how much stationery you will use per annum as ordering little and often can result in spending too much as you are constantly paying for delivery and setup costs, so why not buy 6 or 12 month supply at a time? This can save you money, and can keep consistency as well as continuity of your business stationery regular through the year. If you don’t have the storage space, some print suppliers can warehouse and organise distribution for you. As an example we have an online portal where your stock can be setup, you can call off items and have them delivered anywhere in the UK, all from the comfort of your office or living room. In fact we can even offer a hierarchical login system that allows you to delegate to team members the ordering (at fixed price) then you can simply approve ordering for them. Would that save you time and money? Thought so…
These 4 rules will ensure you get best value for money on your corporate stationery and branding but also maintain and potentially improve your print quality and consistency. This can only lead to enhancing your brand to both prospects and clients.
if you would like a free audit of your print or business stationery please just fill in your contact details below and we can arrange a consultation, no pressure just a free audit, with some ideas thrown in for free![gravityform id=”1″ title=”true” description=”true”]