If you’re buying workplace uniforms it can be tough to decide what’s best for your team. There’s a wide range of variables: price, colour, cut, design, printing, embroidery … the permutations seem almost endless. Here are a few tips to simplify the decision-making process:

• Price is vital, but remember that initial price may not be the whole story. Thin, cheap clothing may not launder well, or may fade or warp, giving a poor impression of your business and maybe causing your staff to feel demoralised. You may also end up replacing cheap uniforms quicker. Google your shortlisted brands and see what reviewers have to say about durability.

• Colour matters, and it’s best to pick something that resembles your business logo, often called your ‘livery’ in the trade. A complementary colour can harmonise with that livery, while a contrasting colour adds life to the item. Designers and garment printers have vast experience in what colours work well, so call on their expertise to help you get something that will look good and be easy to see. Take their advice on whether to go for embroidery or printing too, as they will have knowledge of clothing use in similar industries to yours.

• Allow for weather variations, and remember that an air conditioned office may be colder than a heated driver’s cab, so your view of what your employees need may be inaccurate. Give them the opportunity to layer clothing: a vest under a shirt or a polo-shirt that can be worn with a jacket or fleece, a cap or a knit hat.

If promotional clothing does its job, it will become an heirloom – vintage T-shirts, retro fashion boiler suits and dresses, previously loved ties and bags, all these are desirable but fragile items. Modern promotional clothing may become the much-desired heirloom of the future, and knowing how to care for it can help you and your team enjoy your custom printed or embroidered work-wear, your team T-shirts or your on-tour hoodies.

Giving this information to your clients, either as a cute promotional leaflet or as a care page on your website, can have an unexpected bonus effect – it builds customer loyalty by showing that you have an ethical approach to making the most of the clothing you sell/provide.

• Washing – if your T-shirts are printed, always turn them inside out before washing and dry them on a line, inside out, not in a tumble dryer. This means that the printed image isn’t constantly being rubbed up against other fabrics which can abrade it. Wash dark fabrics on the lowest possible temperature.
• Stains – salt is the best way to remove deodorant stains from dark clothing. Just wet the stain with cold water, pour salt onto it and gently press it into the stain. Next day, add about 2 tablespoons of salt to the wash water. To avoid these stains in the first place, apply deodorant the night before – it prevents damp and odour just the same, but it stops the aluminium in the deodorant getting onto the fabric. If you spill something oily on promotional clothing, soak the stain, as soon as possible, in pure washing up liquid – preferably an environmentally friendly one as it’s less likely to contain bright pigments like blue or green that can actually tint the garment. Leave for an hour and then dip the stain in a small bowl of white vinegar and wash. Most oily stains will have completely disappeared.
• Pressing/Ironing – not everybody irons their T-shirts but most people iron, or have their shirts laundered – if your cotton shirts are monogrammed, it’s best not to iron over the embroidery directly. Instead lay an old white pillowcase or tea-towel over the embroidered area and run the iron over that.

In Punjab, a recent press conference has made a startling claim – recent outbreaks of ‘hot-headed’ behaviour by the police (including lathi charges – lathis being the Indian equivalent of a baton) could be put down to the colour of their new uniforms: black.

The uniforms have been changed from white to black recently, and a senior policeman and several of his colleagues concurred, but others have said that it’s more necessary to have a change of police thinking than of police uniforms.

However – colour psychology has some interesting insights into this idea. It claims that colour can have a profound effect on behaviour and further, says that black clothing denotes authority, power, strength, evil (?), intelligence, death or mourning, while grey, a popular colour for military uniforms, and for casual clothing in the motor industry, gives an aura of neutrality, timelessness and practicality. Blue – the colour most chosen for casual clothing across the world, provides an atmosphere of calmness, wisdom, loyalty and truth but may also seem cold and uncaring.

When choosing uniform items, highlighting with a contrasting colour can be useful. So blue can be made warm and jolly with orange printing, or grey can be given life and verve by the addition of purple embroidery.

When ordering clothing for companies, schools or teams, it’s important to get the beset value for money possible. Here are four tips to help get the most from your budget:

1. Keep a record of previous purchases. Don’t forget to include the date of ordering, sizes and a copy of any artwork you supply to the manufacturer or printer. This helps when placing a new order, as you may find you need to adjust the amount of clothing you order in each size, or the time of year at which you order, to get the best discount. Schools may find that they need more clothes in the larger child sizes than they had appreciated, as children get taller every year, and that they are not using all the smaller sizes, so money is being wasted on unworn polo-shirts or shorts.

2. Record turnover and causes for it. It can be difficult to keep track of uniform disbursement, but where possible, you can try to establish why uniform clothing needs to be replaced or upgraded. Planning ahead can also save you money: ordering summer clothing in good time for the warm weather can mean you benefit from a slower free delivery, rather than having to pay a premium delivery rate for a rush order.

3. Ask about discounts. Sometimes you can get a better discount by purchasing more, or changing your delivery options – if you’ve kept a good record of your past purchasing, you can probably work out ways to make savings on bulk purchases and still make good use of everything you buy.

4. Ask about extras. Many suppliers can offer a range of accessories and supplementary options that support uniform clothing, such as high-visibility detailing on winter clothing, logos on summer caps that protect the wearers from sunburn, or even value-added extras such as printed bags in which to transport the new clothing being supplied

Closed loop manufacturing has become an increasing focus of Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives and McDonald’s are leading the way. It’s no surprise that uniforms that are related to the London Olympics have been under scrutiny for their environmental impacts, and that high profile companies are keen to ensure their promotional activities are in line with the latest social and environmental guidelines.

Many organisations, from Marks & Spencer to the National Grid, are looking into producing closed-loop clothing, whereby some of the polyester in the original garment is broken down into a polymer that can then be respun into a yarn that is rewoven into new clothing.

A London based consultancy, Worn Again, is helping other corporations to repurpose their corporate clothing into new items. For example, the old Eurostar headrests were repurposed into bags and utility pouches for Eurostar train managers, Royal Mail winter jackets have also been recycled into bags. It’s claimed that 33.4 million uniforms are purchased each year, of which something less than 5% are recycled.

The key messages here are:

1. Look at corporate clothing through its entire lifetime and plan an end-of-life use that can be a good story for the corporation.
2. Set up clothing collection systems in the workplace to gather corporate clothing for re-cycling or closed-loop processing.
3. Re-use, repurpose and recycle any workplace clothing that can’t be built into a closed loop process, and ensure that embroidery or printing can contribute to the repurposing by have logos printed in areas that can then be re-used to make smaller, ‘ready-branded’ items.

Iris van Herpen may not be a household name, but her new clothing technologies may be about to change the face of promotional clothing forever. van Herpen is a Dutch designer, beloved of Bjork, amongst others, and she’s currently staging an exhibition in Groningen that features clothing she has created for catwalk shows. And each piece has been modelled using 3D software.

It’s counterintuitive to what most of us know about clothing design, which is the idea that designers use the actual fabric and drape, cut and shape it around a model to see what’s possible – but van Herpen has other ideas. This new technology pushes the boundaries of what can be done with fabric, just as simulation software allows surgeons to push the limits of what can be done with surgery.

As an example, Bjork wears a 3D print dress with constellations on it for the promotional video for her single, Moon. Similar applications for promotional clothing could be 3D street maps to help people locate new businesses. And of course, for the next few years, such promotional clothing, whether it’s a printed T-shirt or a 3D hat that ‘changes’ the head shape of the wearer (Klingon printed hats are already being explored by the Star Trek franchise, apparently) will be headline-earning, and that’s the purpose of good promotional garments.

There are three key concerns when selecting promotional clothing

• Budget
• Appearance
• Performance

Budget is simple and is usually the tightest and most evident constraint on promotional clothing. There will usually be a limit on what can be spent, and within that limit the clothing has to be effective and attractive.

Appearance can be shaped by material – cheap T-shirts do not last long, but if you are promoting a short-term event such as a weekend sale or a festival, they may be all that is required. More substantial materials will give a longer life to the garment and a more solid appearance to the clothing which reflects on the brand the promotional clothing supports. Bear in mind the climate and population in your chosen area: if there are many older residents, you are more likely to succeed with polo-shirts than T-shirts, but if there’s a large student population, jogging pants and T-shirts will be much more popular than classic clothing items.

Performance is part of the process of applying promotional clothing to the world. If you choose embroidered baseball caps, they will get much more wear in summer than winter, while knit hats will be more popular in winter than summer. Barbecue aprons are summer clothing but gloves and scarves perform best for their brand in winter. Making a wise selection gets your message out their for the maximum period of time, but other businesses will know this too, so don’t disregard the competition when planning your promotional clothing: your garments have to be attractive to get worn as well as season-appropriate.

Geeklist has had an interesting couple of weeks. It all started with them launching a promotional video showing a pretty woman dancing around in a Geeklist T-shirt and underclothes. Somewhat to their surprise it didn’t go down too well with the many women in the tech industries who used the social media that Geeklist features on to complain.

Then something odd happened. The Geeklist team became defensive and started attacking the people who were tweeting about the T-shirt wearing video, telling them their tone was inappropriate and they should ‘take it offline’.

Finally they saw sense, but not until a darkly brilliant bug report made the rounds of their industry, playing a mind-game with the situation that has become a meme in how not to promote your brand.

So what went wrong?

1. Failure to engage with the client base – not least in that a woman is likely to have pointed out the alternative interpretations of their video (if they’d consulted one)
2. Failure to engage with T-shirt designer – most T-shirt companies, designers and printers have a clear idea how to steer clear of controversy, and a good sense of how close to go to that edge, because they’ve worked with many clients trying to promote themselves (seems Geeklist didn’t consult their designer/printer about their intentions either)
3. Failure to respond to the problem sensibly – when they were challenged on Twitter, Geeklist went after the challengers – failing to notice that in one case, it was a major client who had raised concerns and inflaming the situation even further by being rude to somebody who’s paying their wages …

While they will probably survive this, Geeklist have provided a perfect example of how a simple, low-budget promotional gimmick can blow up in your face if you don’t think it through and get some expert advice!

As British football fans focus on the recovery of Fabrice Muamba after a collapse on the football pitch, supportive T-shirts abound. Meantime, in New Jersey, America, a new T-shirt raises awareness of brain injury – its causes, its treatment and the need to raise funds for people with such injuries. The limited edition shirt is on sale for a month only.

Footballers are lifting their team shirts to show messages of support for Fabrice Muamba and his family, and the awareness of the risks of cardiac arrest and the value of knowing CPR and being able to do it on somebody whose heart has stopped.

Such awareness raising activities can be a valuable support to community activities – also being promoted this week is a walk for a hospice, linked to Davina McCall’s personal trainer whose relatives benefited from the hospice’s existence and TOWIE star Amy Childs wearing a Sport Relief T-shirt.

Of course not every business can find a celebrity to endorse them, but just about every business can find a good cause that needs public awareness and offer to sponsor a T-shirt or polo shirt that will help raise the profile of the cause. It can be extremely cheap, and by linking a subtle brand element such as a logo, to the awareness raising T-shirt, companies can create a long term association between themselves and a popular and worthy cause which benefits both parties.

Linking such T-shirts to an event can be even more positive: a marathon team, a group undertaking a world record, a flash mob or just giving out information leaflets about the cause in the street all bring a new recognition of the cause, and of the company that is supporting it through branded clothing.

The cult of the celebrity chef has become established around the globe: TV chefs have huge followings and branded restaurants are found everywhere from cruise ships to capital cities.

Now kitchen uniforms get the star treatment, as increasing numbers of venues opt for stylish clothing, not just for table staff, but for kitchen employees too, to bring a sense of the theatrical to dining out. Personalising chef’s uniforms has become a standard treatment, especially in ‘view’ dining venues where tours of the kitchen, or windows opening on to it, are commonplace. This allows each chef to create a sense of identity for him or herself, and gives them a chance to personalise the experience each diner receives.

Hotelier has recently reported on this phenomenon with particular focus on the Middle East, where celebrity chefs have just started to appear, but where colourful uniforms for kitchen staff have been much more acceptable than has been the case in the USA and Europe, until very recently.

Retaining key staff is also a feature of personalising uniforms for employees as have embroidered names or other identifying emblems such as logos can help companies to keep individuals and promote their identities within their industry.