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.

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.

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.

A nuts and bolts article by Forbes shows how clothing brand Mishka has linked its garments to music to create a compelling blend for consumers, but what can non-clothing brands do to distinguish themselves from the competition?

Mishka has developed a relationship with hip-hop groups that has fed a loyalty factor into its garment sales. When groups like BBU are endorsed by DJs like Diplo, the spin-off for the clothing company that supports the group is a group of fans that wear Mishka clothing to show their fandom for Diplo, or BBU or several other bands.

The average business may not feel equipped or even keen, to get into the world of music promotion, but every founder has some kind of outside interest. For Mishka’s Mikhail Bortnik it was skate graphics and band T-shirts. For a car dealership owner it may be classic cars, the proprietor of a white goods store may love bowling, or the wife of the founder of a software company may be committed to growing vegetables. Whatever the passion, there are ways to promote relationships in the community through clothing, sponsorship and genuine grass roots enthusiasm.

Mishka was one of the first clothing retailers to have a blog ‘The Bloglin’ which launched in 2007 and became a check in point for fashion fans and music fans alike.

Bowling tournament schedules can be posted online with reviews of previous games, tips and hints about what to grow now and what to cook with what’s seasonally available can be treated similarly. Recipe lists given away with white goods – bowling bags or vegetable bags or baseball caps printed with the company logo for anybody doing anything outdoors, sponsored bowls or weed clearances for a local charity … the ideas are limited only by the ingenuity of those involved, and it’s much easier to promote a good cause than a company, any day. Getting staff involved is just as easy. You can set up a bowling team or a workplace vegetable bed, offer a prize for the best score or the biggest potato, and then put out regular press releases about the company’s charitable activities, supported by photos of the team wearing branded clothing.

We’ve all become used to seeing racing drivers and Grand Prix motorcyclists, and their vehicles, emblazoned with sponsorship decals and promotional symbols, but now Honda’s MotoGP team is benefitting from a new technology created in partnership with the Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP) which combines promotional clothing with sensors that collect and transmit data over a wireless network.

The T-shirts are able to conduct a real-time monitoring of the rider, creating an intelligent garment that is non-invasive and allows sports professionals to analyse the overall performance of an athlete by, for example, assessing if body temperature or dehydration are contributing to a slowing of response time, or whether physical effort during a race is leading to a build up of lactic acid in the rider’s body which can slow recovery time.

The clothing could also combine promotional activity with data gathering – it is possible, for example, for embedded LEDs in a garment to flash in unison with a rider’s heartbeat, which could lead to an interaction between clothing and race commentators who would be able to interpret the rider’s emotional responses via the rate at which symbols on clothing flashed or changed colour.

The clothing will be road-tested during the Qatar Grand Prix in April.

It appears that the subject of school uniforms is a hot one, and not just because children attending school during the recent cold spell have been turning up with several layers under their uniforms to keep them warm. While Tam Baillie, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People thinks boys should be able to wear skirts to school because otherwise school uniform codes are a “discriminatory practice” against “gender variant” pupils.

In Scotland, of course, gender differences are rarely focused on who wears trousers, so the debate is a genuinely interesting one around how students “develop a strong sense of who they are” which can mean having a range of options from which children choose is more sensitive to cultural, gender and other differences but doesn’t foster such a strong sense of identity as a limited uniform where people dress like each other to develop a sense of team spirit.

Michael Gove certainly thinks so. According to radio station Totnes FM, the Education Secretary believes that a local school, King Edward VI community college, should introduce a uniform. His comments have left parents, who are still waiting to vote on the plans, somewhat confused at his interest in one school’s policy.

It’s true that uniforms often foster conformity – everybody from airline pilots to Hell’s Angels gains a sense of solidarity from dressing like each other – and everybody ‘outside’ that group gains from being able to identify which individual is a pilot and which a biker, so there’s a value to society from being able to recognise who’s in which ‘team’. But there are other gains too: a uniform can create a sense of self-esteem and remove the differences that stop people working well together: a rich university graduate and a poor self-educated person are identical when they are playing a team game in the same strip or kit, on the same playing field, and that allows them to bond in a way that might never be possible if they weren’t similarly dressed.

There’s another advantage too: branded, printed and monogrammed clothing all allow outsiders to spot the person they want, whether it’s the manager in a restaurant or the striker in a football team – it’s an intelligent approach to teamwork that allows everybody to benefit.

As President Obama fired a marshmallow cannon in the White House dining room in a publicity stunt that resonated around the world, a range of promotional clothing to fund the incumbent’s Presidential re-election campaign went on sale. It’s a bewildering concept for the British voter: while some people put up posters in their windows, or may put a sticker in their car, almost nobody would wear a campaign T-shirt, unless it was a satirical comment on the election process as a whole. In America though, dressing the part demonstrates commitment to a candidate and to their funding, which is strictly regulated by the Federal Electoral Commission. Beyonce Knowles has designed a T-shirt for the campaign, and a silk scarf created by Monique Pean bears the President’s portrait.

The drive to sell is being fuelled by deliberately low prices which allow people to get a designer label (tops by Marc Jacobs, or a bag by Diane von Furstenburg) at much lower than usual prices. The opposition have raised questions about the issue, suggesting that while the designers may have donated their time for free, anybody who would normally be paid to help produce printed clothing would be ‘underwriting’ the campaign, which is illegal, but the Obama team say they are confident that all the technical support given to and by the designers was voluntary and unpaid.

It’s not always easy to see how you can promote your business: if you’re a plumber then you have contact details on the side of your van; if you’re a baker you put Bakery above your shopfront or market stall, but many businesses these days are more difficult to showcase.

How does a horse-sitter (somebody who exercises horses while their owner is unable to) or a pilates instructor or a public speaking coach get the kind of publicity that other businesses rack up simply by having a shop or vehicle?

It may require a certain amount of ingenuity. If you’re a horse sitter or dog walker, it may be worth getting customised clothing for the animals you work with: dog jackets and dog T-shirts are big fashion business, as well as ideal promotional surfaces, and giving the owner of your dogs a free garment for their animal can help spread your message to others.

For a Pilates instructor, sponsorship may be a great way to go: offering a free session to the local bowls club or running group, followed by having your logo and contact number on their club clothing, is an effective way of enhancing a local visibility and spreading the message to likely clients. It allows you to become identified with something that is positive (sports for older people or community fitness) and can lead to opportunities such as having a stall at a race or local competition.

For a speaking coach, why not consider sponsoring a schools debate – getting children involved in public speaking can lead to a lot of free publicity, local newspapers, TV and radio always love to feature kids doing something interesting and positive and if they are wearing clothing branded with your logo, that can be a lot of free publicity!