‘Karl’ is an online fashion collection which will be offered to net buyers for a month before it is made available in shops.

It’s an increasing trend which analysts identify as being part of the move towards rejuvenation of the fashion industry via the web. Online clothing retail has become a large growth area in otherwise moribund economies, and brands like Versace have seen it as a way of maintaining exclusivity for differing areas of their clothing empires, for example by having an online brand specifically targeted at preteens that doesn’t impinge on their established brands for adults.

In the ten years from April 2001 the overall value of online clothing retail grew by an astonishing 3,200% according to a report by the Interactive Media in Retail Group. This may be in part due to the fact that better-off individuals are more likely to buy named brands and also less likely to be suffering the effects of the recession. Mid-range branded clothing is also growing comfortably through online retailing and group purchasing has increased, suggesting sports teams and small companies are focusing on the benefits to be gained from buying uniforms or team clothing online with free postage, easy returns and discounts for larger orders.

Burberry and Coach have also moved into the online retail market which offers several other benefits, including the ability to discount more heavily. Sports brands such as Nike and Adidas in particular are keen to expand their access to new markets and this is likely to mean that online shoppers benefit from bargains in the months ahead.

While Facebook is the Goliath of social networking, there are many Davids out there, getting niche attention.

One way that brands and businesses are using bespoke social media is to drive networking through only the media that will reach their ideal customer base. So for example, Levis is using Instagram, the hip and retro photographic network, to find models for its next advertising campaign. One committed Instagram user is Jamie Oliver, and Barack Obama’s campaign team use the photo networking site too, as do Burberry, MTV and Bergdorf’s, Gucci, Billboard Magazine and Starbucks.

It’s easy to see that there’s a target market there: liberal, food conscious, keen to be on trend but not a brand slave … and that Instagram carries a message that links similar brands so that Jamie Oliver can be seen wearing Levi’s jeans, or a Bergdorf’s catwalk model spotted drinking Starbucks – the linkages create interest that drives activity.

So for Redbull, for example, find that posting pictures of casually clad people doing ‘out there’ things in daily life – skateboarding to work or dancing in an underground train – links their brand to a small but dedicated social media outlet that will drive attention to their product.

Promotional clothing has an unusual role in this kind of media, because it’s an almost wordless communication – Burberry works hard to ensure its models have a distinctly British look and boosts that by setting them against quintessential British backgrounds to give a strong, if silent, message to viewers.

Storify is being used by many big brands in a similar fashion, but to wrap social media into a brand line (eg Levi’s recent foray into the way women see themselves through their clothing choices) that gives a social media boost to a brand led statement. Tumblr is another social network that is being used to integrate promotional activity, branded clothing, consumer aspirations and peer recommendation.

For many companies, offering a personalised or branded gift at Christmas has several purposes:

1.    It recognises customer loyalty
2.    It creates brand recognition
3.    It offers a thank you to new customers who may not be fully engaged with the brand yet
4.    It establishes the company offering the gift as being substantial and caring.

These are great marketing opportunities that shouldn’t be neglected even when marketing budgets are tight. In fact, thinking creatively around the idea of a business to customer gift is a great way to establish some brand features that will encourage your customers to think of the company as one that supports them in tough times.

Branded clothing has practical value, unlike the traditional forms of corporate gift such bottles of wine or spirits, boxes of chocolates or the more modern and less personal approach of giving vouchers.

At the top end of the scale, monogrammed shirts, or hoodies for younger individuals offer a superb, highly-personalised approach to gift giving. It’s not a cheap way to recognise the customer’s value but for the truly valued client, it’s a brilliant approach. Think outside the box though, and see if you can select something that the customer will really value: sports clothing with a monogram that a customer can use for their favourite sport is an ideal way to say thank you.

In the middle of the market, T-shirts offer a chance to give a gift that gets worn, and is fully appreciated without breaking the bank. If your customers are young, find a young designer to style your company logo in a completely new way, that reflects current trends but if they’re more traditional, go for a classic and simple statement, maybe the company logo as a sleeve print or small embroidered detail with neat and unobtrusive contact details below it.

For the masses, if you have lots of customers and/or want to buy something that can be used for both Christmas gift and general promotional purposes, think about branded hats or lightweight bags. Don’t fall for too much novelty though: amusing images like Santa riding on your logo etc are only funny for a very short time and then fall out of favour and have no value to the recipient. It’s better to think about longevity and choose a hat or bag that will be used year round. Practicality is the key to a successful gift and you can double the promotional whammy you get from such items by running a competition that offers to reward the person who takes the best picture of their hat/bag in an unusual place or in a location appropriate to your business. Post the photos on facebook and tweet about them in your twitter account to get the maximum cross-platform marketing boost from your promotional clothing spend.

After their first Rugby World Cup win in 24 years, All Blacks fans have bought up and bought out virtually every piece of promotional clothing bearing their teams name in the entire country.

Nobody can ever know how well sporting promotions will work out because one of the variables is the performance of the team that wears the sponsored clothing, but when it works, it really works.
Major New Zealand retailers have sold out of stock with one retailer sending out more than 100,000 fan-wear items including hats, scarves and shirts. Most stores, whether physical or online, ran out of stock before the final weekend’s matches.

New rugby shirts were printed to commemorate the win, and they have already sold out too.

Interestingly, New Zealanders also bought many hats, bags and scarves to support the Pacific Island teams who are their near neighbours, showing that once a sporting event catches the information, many smaller promoters and brands benefit from the rush to possess a memento of the event.

Whether it’s a sunshiny top to be worn by professional dance partners on a cruise ship, a crisp white number for staff at a convention or a durable grey T-shirt for delivery drivers to wear when representing your organisation, a T-shirt is a brilliant shop-front for your organisation.

Some individuals in a business can carry a different message to others – one company in the West of England has delivery staff who wear ‘How’s my smiling?’ T-shirts, featuring a delivery van image and a number to call if the delivery person is particularly pleasant … as a result of this simple message, they are finding that they get first orders from organisations in buildings they’ve delivered to, because the T-shirts have created a recognition factor.

Words and pictures

One key feature of a marketable popular T-shirt is a popular or funny slogan. Can your business create an amusing but professional slogan or image that makes it memorable? Sheila’s Wheels insurance company made a splash with their vivid pink TV adverts – and the follow through led to a ‘fan’ site, downloadable adverts and music and even staff wearing pink and Sheila’s Wheels tribute acts! The Meerkats are producing an even bigger public recognition factor – can your business do the same?

Choose a garment

Using really high quality blank T-shirts and good print quality gives you durable and attractive T-shirts for your employees.

Work with your printer

A T-shirt printer has the skills and capacity to produce fairly short runs so you can test the water on your new ideas, maybe by outfitting a single department or region, before sinking lots of capital into them.

Freddie Flintoff is 6ft 4in tall. That’s significant, as he’s just become the figurehead of online shop Jamaco, where he’ll model for the catalogue as well as having his own clothing range Flintoff by Jacamo appearing on the virtual shelves early next year. What’s the appeal?

Well Jacamo sell clothing up to 5XL and Flintoff has regularly complained how difficult he finds it to get his favourite clothing styles, such as cargo trousers and relaxed fit shirts, in his size. The match between his size and the customer base, make the role a natural one.

Over in the USA, Guy Harvey Inc is a company that markets and licences the artworks of Guy Harvey – a nautical artist famous for his marine landscapes. The company works hard to build brand, from organising promotional clothing for events through to links with cause-related marketing work with Harvey’s own foundation and research institute. This includes printing and selling more than 50,000 printed T-shirts to support the cleanup of the Deep Water Horizon disaster.

Profits will fund a special fishing research fund set up through the foundation to create partnerships with local universities and laboratories looking at marine cleanup issues. By creating promotional clothing that is relevant and gives back to the community, the link between Harvey’s artwork, marine conservation and giving back to the natural world are all strengthened. Promotional clothing can thus become a central part of an organisation’s brand identity, as well as a way of funding activities that give a company a great public profile.

But not in a good way.  According to GQ Magazine, Atlanta is America’s 17th worst-dressed city, where ‘everyone is a CEO or founder of a record label or a clothing line you’d have never heard of if it weren’t plastered in size 96 Helvetica font on their chest’ – ouch!

So what makes good promotional clothing?

Test it

Keep early print runs small, so the expense is manageable and storage isn’t a problem. Once you know there is demand, you can go for more garments but at first, 100 T-shirts may be all you can shift effectively.

Work up

Don’t invest in a half-hearted venture with somebody from the local art college and the printer down the road who’s been screen-printing T-shirts for bands for the past thirty years – find professionals to design your artwork and print your clothing or you’ll end up with ugly, ill-designed, unpopular promotional items that you can’t even persuade your best friend to wear in public.

Be free

Start by giving away good but cost-effective promotional gear like caps, later you can sell niche items through retail outlets: T-shirts are popular but embroidered gifts for events and festivals, or season specific garments like winter gloves, summer vests and other apparel can become collectors’ items.

Get passionate

If you are your own target market, think like yourself! If you like what you offer, so will potential investors/buyers/service users, but if you end up with promotional clothing that you wouldn’t wear yourself, you’ve short-changed yourself, your business and your potential customers.

For decades it’s been the polo-shirt that has been the classic choice of apparel for security and hospitality staff at summer events. There are many reasons for this:
1.    Polo-shirts are cost effective to brand
2.    Polos are comfortable to wear
3.    The polo-shirt design means it fits most people from small to XXL and works with most cultural and personal clothing preferences.

Even so, many companies find their spend on branded polo-shirts is higher than expected and this can be for several reasons:
•    The shirt is the wrong colour (try to avoid white in situations involving grass and mud and black in situations where people are working outdoors as black ‘traps’ heat)
•    The sleeve length is wrong (short when it needs to reach the wrist or long when people are overheated and constantly push it up so it becomes baggy)
•    The fabric blend is wrong (too much artificial fibre makes people sweat and therefore their clothing smells unpleasant, too little artificial fibre and clothing can crease too easily making it demanding to launder and iron and so people request new shirts instead of taking care of the old ones)
•    The fabric is too thin to take the embroidered logo – some summerweight shirts just don’t hold their shape with a chunky embroidered logo and start to fold over at that point (take advice from a professional clothing provider to ensure your design and your garment are perfectly matched).

Sometimes the problem is the wrong kind of clothing has been chosen:
•    If you want something really casual, try a T-shirt instead
•    For smarter venues consider a short-sleeved button-through shirt – the ideal choice for restaurant and casino security staff.

Any album from a major pop talent is cross-marketed these days: there will be magazine covers, appearances on chat shows, maybe some kind of kiss-and-tell story or relationship bust-up and often, for women, a cosmetic or clothing deal that links the star to the music to the T-shirt, but Lady Gaga’s May album release, of Born This Way took promotional activity to a whole new level. As well as the album itself, Lady Gaga had:
•    Magazine covers, including Vogue
•    Chat show slots from Oprah to American Idol and everything in between
•    A Starbucks tie-in with the coffee chain selling her album and sponsoring a digital Gaga scavenger hunt
•    Google Chrome running a commercial with a downloadable album track
•    Best Buy giving away the album to every new contract phone owner
•    Farmville creators Zynga making Gagaville which features exclusive song clips and sheep wearing leather jackets and other Gaga inspired clothing!

And the retail clothing tie-in?  Yes, she did that too, with online fashion store Gilt Group who offered Gaga style clothing along with a ‘VIP’ online performance for buyers and the chance to win tickets to future concerts

And it worked. Her album was estimated to sell anything between half a million and a million copies in the first month – in fact it topped 1.1 million sales in the first week alone. Bill Werde, editorial director of Billboard, said ‘There’s nothing about Gaga that’s subtle, so I don’t see why her marketing campaign would be any different.’

Maybe the average new product, band or company can’t go to Gaga-esque lengths of self-promotion, and perhaps they wouldn’t want to (steak underwear, anyone?)

But there’s usually a bit more that can be done, a bit of outright self-promotion that the average business feels too small or reticent to undertake: whether it’s ringing the local radio station and ‘selling’ them charity/local business news-story, posting a You Tube video of your sales team doing a Glee karaoke impression or buying bright pink T-shirts with a sharp logo to launch a new hairdressers – and that’s when thinking like Lady Gaga can move promotion from hard work to having fun.

Lady Gaga courtesy of Jazmin Million

This month an online shopfront with a difference has opened – it’s for Pope Benedict XVI’s September trip to the UK and offers a series of mementoes: an embroidered baseball cap like the one the Pope has been seen wearing himself this summer, keyrings and fridge magnets and a range of T-shirts including one that can be personalised to include the name of the individual’s local church.

Several commentators have remarked on how similar the highly detailed printed T-shirts are to heavy metal designs and colour schemes it’s hoped they will appeal to a wide range of ‘pilgrims’ to help cover the £7 million cost of the visit.

The church is not alone in merchandising for the trip: the National Secular Society also has an online presence offering T-shirts with the slogan ‘Pope Nope’.

If your business is merchandising for an event or promotion, try thinking about how you offer your merchandise – you can use the angle of local identity, perhaps by promoting your locality, alongside your business, offering T-shirts with maps to local parks but including your shop.

Try point of sale branding if you have a physical location too, such as on sunny days giving away a baseball cap with your telephone number on it, or a rain hat or umbrella on rainy days. You can even offer a random prize for people buying in your shop or ringing up, every sixtieth customer, or whatever, can be sent a promotional T-shirt with their order, and you can give unrecognisable information about each winner (eg their first name and initial of surname, to keep within data protection rules) on your website.