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Promotional Products with a Difference

By Lucinda, on 20 June 2012 | Category: Projects 0 comments

At Optima we love brands but you won’t find us wearing them on our sleeves. However, just because we don’t wear corporate clothing, that doesn’t mean we don’t understand its role in promoting your brand.

Unfortunately a lot of corporate clothing and promotional merchandise isn’t done well. Think emblazoned logos, useless tat and offending colours. But, what if we made it cool? What if we designed indispensible items that are both useful and stylish?

The corporate umbrella

Take the umbrella – a key item in Britain thanks to the Great British weather. There’s a myriad of designs from the golf umbrella and the square straight style, to the compact umbrella, and those that businessmen walk with (you know, the cane style ones). Whichever one you use there’s a style for all. That is until they’re branded with logos on every panel and garish colours.

So, when we were commissioned to design and supply a corporate umbrella for Branston, we were eager to break the mould and create a quality product that was branded enough to be corporate yet discreet enough to be stylish.

Matt Chambers, Optima Senior Designer, chose a classic style with a colourful twist: “We chose a soft grip handle double-skinned umbrella that allowed us to brand a classic black umbrella with a vibrant Branston green lining to cheer users up on a rainy day and create a dual look.”

Promotional products we’ve produced

Branston also asked us to come up with a fun set of corporate mugs and we designed a colourful range of mugs based on the dictionary definitions of words associated with potatoes. Lincoln Think Tank asked us to design some innovative give-aways to promote the opening of the innovation centre and we sourced some micro USB memory sticks and thermo reactive mugs that change colour, revealing an image of the building once filled with hot water. British Gypsum asked us to create a bag for visitors of their exhibition stands to take away and we designed an eye catching pop art style bag that complemented their stand. The International School of Geneva asked us to provide something to engage students wen celebrating the opening of the new art centre and we provided them sets of colourful stickers featuring quirky characters and words to personalise their belongings.

If you’d like a quote for bespoke promotional merchandise or clothing that’s corporate yet stylish and gets your brand noticed, or would just like to discuss how to make promotional products work for your business contact us on info@optimadesign.co.uk or call 01522 522773 and we’ll send you one of our coffee break-inspired Optima-branded welcome packs.