Blog posts of '2017' 'August'

My charity bike ride is fast approaching, way too fast if you ask me! Althbough I have been able to complete quite a few 15 - 30 mile rides longer distances have been very sadly lacking this year. Last weekend was taken up by the incredibly good airshow held annualy in Eastbourne, imaginatvely called "Airbourne". The Red Arrows put on a marvellous display as always and the weather on the Sunday allowed for some new manouveres that were very exciting and the lack of any real cloud gave them the chance to draw their heart in the sky.

Visually quite stunning. Anyway, that put paid to any training last weekend and now a wedding in Newcastle, an 800 mile round trip for me from where I live, will eliminate any cylce training this weekend and very probably do the exact opposite!!

That said I am really looking forward to the ride as the cameradarie is the most intense I have ever witnessed, especially around the 70 mile mark each day when fatigue is really setting in and everyone, well everyone of my standard, is beginning to struggle. 

More importantly knowing that a large amount of money is being raised to help the really sick, often terminally ill children that so badly need the help makes it all worth while in the end.

All the riders are totally self funded and so every penny donated goes to help the children through smaller charities that don't have large overheads and staff on 6 figure salaries!!

Any donation, no matter how small will be very gratefully received.

Vistaprint launched in 1999 and has gone from a pure start-up print company to an internet giant with over $2 billion in annual sales.

It did so because it introduced a totally new business model, that of only having an on-line presence. An industry commited to customer service delivered by company representatives who worked long and hard to build long lasting relationships with the decision makers of the clients in their given territory was suddenly turned upside down. The printing industry was slow to appreciate that for a very large percentage of both the jobs that were wanted and the people that had to order them a quick, no fuss on-line solution was just ideal. To so many customers it didn't matter that they'd used a small J-Peg logo instead of the crisp and clear vector graphic that their usual printer had on file. It didn't even matter if the job wasn't quite as expected first time round, it was so cheap and so quick you just did it again.

The very same type of disruptive technology is just starting to appear in the Promotional Products industry which is why Pulsar Print Management, having learnt lessons from the printing side of the business where we had to play catch-up for a while, is beginning to launch individual sites with every product already branded with your logo and available to order immediatley on-line.

The only difference is there will still be our high level of customer care, quality control and value going on, it will just be behind the scenes or more accurately, behind your screen. We are planning on being able to roll out our new fully e-commerce sites from mid-September. Please do contact us if you would like to be first on the list. These sites will have an ever growing list of items available to order but they will run in tandem with our main site where if its possible to have your logo on it you can find it there.

We hope you will be suitably impressed.

If you have visted our website a few times in recent weeks you will have noticed some quite major changes. We have gone from a very static non mobile friendly site that looked like this:

To a much more searchable, useable and more importantly, mobile friendly website that looks something like this:

The development hasn't stopped there. When we originally launched the site we had a price range that we quoted on all of the products with the exception of some POA items such as USB sticks where the price fluctuates considerably sometimes even on a day to day basis. The problem we found with quoting a price range was that customers, quite rightly in our opinion, thought that the lower price would be for a lot of items branded in a single colour and the higher price would be for fewer items branded in full colour. A reasonable assumption but far from the truth. The idea behind the range was to give an impression of whether the particular item was to be regarded as a 'budget', 'mid range' or 'premium' product. That wasn't very clear and what was even more difficult was to try and explain to a customer that wanted a product in the £0.40 - £0.79 range that in fact they would cost £3.00 each by the time they were personalised, delivered and had VAT added.

It is of course almost impossible to give any sort of accurate guide because the variations that can be specified are so great. Given this we have decided that to just quote a 'From' price will give a much more representative figure when you look at any product. This change happened last Thursday and is a major step forward we think. There are still inaccuracies on the database relating to some of the minimim order quantities etc, but rest assured we are constantly working to improve every area.

We hope you enjoy our new website, happy browsing.

I'm sure we've all had those moments when you come across something and can't believe you didn't think of it first. Well today I'm going to talk about two such items. One is a bit frivalous but good none the less the other could actually save lives.

Firstly then from Renault, Nail Varnish that matches the colour of your car!

Renault, no doubt aware of the growing number of women making and influencing car purchases must have thought that the discerning woman would enjoy having nails that reflected her choice of car colour, or indeed the other way round. Not only is there a significant aesthetic benefit but a real practical one too, the Nail Varnish can also be used to touch up any small scratches on the car. Only the four colours available at the moment but I can see the range increasing very soon.

On a much more serious note though, small children left in cars when the mercury is really climbing are at a very real risk of serious injury or even death. A new device that acts as a second seat belt linking the child seat to the drivers prevents the driver exiting the car without unbuckling the child.

This device has been developed by Nestle and promoted in the Dominican Republic with a campaign run by its Nido powdered milk brand. An initial 10,000 units soon turned into 300,000. 

What a great idea.