Author: Daniel Cardozo

Most of the employees who get handed this responsibility at work aren't professional buyers or print industry veterans. Usually, all they have is a logo file, a rough quantity in mind, a hard deadline and a manager waiting on an answer. The pressure to get it right on the first try is very much there […]

A bulk order comes in, the branded apparel goes out, and then a few weeks later, the logos are already fading, and the colors have gone flat. For anyone who is buying uniforms or promotional garments in volume, that's a pretty expensive lesson to absorb. What separates a garment that still looks sharp after fifty […]

Leftover branded merchandise is one of the most common (and most expensive) frustrations that come out of event planning - and it happens all the time. The shirts get ordered, the tote bags arrive on time, and then attendance ends up lower than expected, or the booth winds down before the giveaway table even gets […]

Woven patches or direct embroidery for your company merchandise - most business owners don't realize how much money is on the line with this choice. Make the wrong call, and you might waste hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars more than necessary. Even worse, your company's logo could come out looking blurry and cheap, and […]

Company apparel orders mean you work with quotes and spec sheets from suppliers. Certifications start to show up on the paperwork and are sewn into the hang tags, and one that pops up quite a bit is something called Oeko-Tex Standard 100. Most business owners and the staff who do the purchasing don't pay much […]

Businesses invest thousands in merch and uniforms each year. Most of them watch that money disappear into a never-ending cycle of replacements, employee complaints and missed opportunities to make their brand stronger. The managers who make these decisions usually treat uniforms and branded merchandise like they're just another box to check. But these items are […]

Teams in the market for custom shirts have to choose factors that barely registered on anyone's radar a few decades back. Sustainability is a big deal now (to team members and to the sponsors who support them), and it makes sense to care about the environmental effects of it. The challenge is that "eco-friendly" doesn't […]

A restaurant chain that chooses Modal for its kitchen staff will find that those employees are going to overheat during the dinner rush night after night. And a bank that selects Tencel for their tellers will probably see that the fabric starts to pill early, so the whole team looks sloppy after just 6 months […]

The fabric you pick for your branded shirts is what separates the ones your entire team actually wants to wear from the ones that get buried in the back of a closet. The fabric choice determines how well your logo is going to print, how comfortable the shirt feels when they put it on and […]

Pick a Pantone shade, send the reference off to production and somehow the finished fabric comes back looking like a very different color. The hue is off, and the depth feels wrong - and your original swatch gave you zero indication that any of this would happen. It's almost never just one variable at play […]