It’s the first Monday in August, so naturally it’s time to start talking about the Christmas period. Our Christmas Marketing website is due for a refurb and wheels are turning in the background to launch a new look site later this month. The range of Christmas products that have been chosen for inclusion has been trimmed from the current selection, paying greater attention to products that are specific to Christmas time.

Corporate Christmas card ideas, company Christmas party invitations and ideas on how to present business gifts at Christmas are all give a strong focus on the new site along with calendars and other ideas for Christmas and New Year promotions.

Amongst the improvements that you will see are increased product information and immediate viewing for product videos. Page access times will also be improved so that visitors are not wasting too much valuable search time waiting for pages to load. Navigational aids have been improved and the whole look of the site has been brightened to enhance the visitor experience.

The whole site is being re-written so this is not a re-hash of existing pages. Research into what visitors want has taken quite a long time and the re-write has been based on our findings so, hopefully, we will not only see an increase in visitors but those visitors should find the site visit much more fruitful. We will keep you posted on the progress so that you can come to visit on opening day.

Today I want to explore pop-ups based on triangles. The triangular based products are pop-up polyhedrons that are made out of ten, twelve or fourteen triangular panels. All make fantastic pop-ups, including a pyramid and gem shapes. The automatic pop-up action makes these products brilliant B2B direct mailers as they introduce the element of surprise in to your promotional campaign and spark interest which is crucial for a mail shot.

These products are also great for Christmas marketing purposes. They are all very popular around this time of year as the shapes of the pop-ups resemble Christmas decorations. Take the Pop-up Pyramid, it has four sides and is extremely popular as a Christmas tree and works very nicely with that design. We can mail it out for you and it will be displayed on desks spreading the Christmas spirit and displaying your festive marketing message.

Also take the Snowflake; this has fourteen triangular faces. Although it does not look much like a snowflake, that design was printed on the shape in the first year of producing it so the name has stuck. Adding a gold or silver loop to the top of the shape transforms this pop-up in to a decoration. This is a great promotional piece with plenty of room to display your promotion.

Another product in this range of triangular based products is the Diamond Pop-up; this shape has ten faces. The Pop-up Diamond is also a popular seasonal promotional product as it can be used as a decoration at Christmas or a lantern for Halloween.

All of these products make extraordinary marketing pieces. The pop-up action makes them unique and exciting. They all come with their own mailer so look more attractive and chunky in the post making them appealing. These products are also very versatile and can be used for many events in any season for example they make compelling corporate Christmas cards and are punchy at product launches, they even can be used for innovative invitations.

Let’s take a look at our range of multi-sided Polyhedrons - more commonly known as our pop-up gem-shaped products.

We have a selection of products in this range. Our Pentagonal Dipyramids we call the Diamond and Johnson 13. Both are great promotional products used as B2B direct mail shots that pop-out at the customer, introducing the element of surprise and instantly grabbing attention.

Another two products in our range are 12 - sided and 14 - sided Polyhedrons, or the Hexapop and the Snowflake shapes. The Snowflake was given the name because the first year we produced the tetra-decahedron shape, it had a snowflake printed on it and this just seemed easier to say and fitted with the shape of the product, therefore the name kind of stuck!

The Hexapop has its name because it has a hexagonal shape and its an automatic pop-up so naturally its a Hexapop. This shape is also known as dodecahedron however this just doesn’t have the same ring, so Hexapop it is!

All the products are automatic pop-ups and their unique action makes them revolutionary direct mailers. These products can be used as a decorative marketing piece around Christmas and therefore extend the life of your marketing message. So don’t do your seasonal promotion without our Pop-up Polyhedron!

In my blog today I am going to talk about the promotional face masks we create. They are used mainly in an event context and can be made in any shape to suit your event.

We do face masks for Christmas parties with our Santa face mask and for Halloween with a scary face mask. We can do a face mask for any event or holiday. Experiment with these to do different ideas. The promotional face masks are very versatile and add great fun to your event. In the past we have made masks for retirement parties, when an important member of staff has retired we do their face on a mask for all the staff to wear bringing amusement to a specific occasion. We have also done masks for football club events, making masks of Mark Hughes’ face when he was the Blackburn Rovers Manager and the face of the club’s star Turkish International, Tugay, when he retired from the game.

We also have face masks that can just be for fun. The Lion face mask can be used at children’s parties and fun houses for kids. These masks are pure entertainment value and can be created to fit your requirements.

These promotional masks are a great way to add that something extra to your corporate events, parties or holiday seasons. Put some light-hearted spirit in to your campaign with one of these simple but effective promotional face masks.

Since early April it seems that we have had nothing but interruptions to our regular business week. Starting with the Easter weekend, followed by two Bank Holiday weekends in May and now we’ve got the World Cup! On each of these occassions our job bookings took a hit and website viewing figures slumped. We are apparently still teetering on the edge of recession, we are allegedly in danger of the dreaded “double dip” and yet the UK seeems desperate to take time off with businesses actually closing early yesterday to watch the World Cup opening day on TV. When does the UK actually stay open for business?

We are fast approaching the holiday season and just when it’s coming to a close we will have the August Bank Holiday. This will be followed by 3 - 4 months of proper trading before it starts all over again with the very bizarre Christmas and New Year period. In this particular spell there are 3 official Bank Holidays and yet many businesses close for at least two weeks. What for? Who in their right mind wants to take time off when the days are short, wet, cold and dark? And how many nights in a row can you get off your face drunk?

All of these holiday factors make running a business very difficult with so many ups and downs and as you might guess, I find it all very frustrating. In the USA most private sector companies get only the “Big 6″ national holidays and if the holiday falls on a Saturday then many banks actually forfeit the holiday. Annual leave is something that often is earned by length of service rather than automatic entitlement and the whole economy seems to be geared to work rather than play. What’s more, the people seem to like it. The country was built by people who were ambitious, forward thinking or who just simply wanted the chance to work hard and to earn a living. For the most part, the work ethic has stuck.

Our own business is very much allied to the advertising, marketing and promotions industries and that means that we are subjected to seasonal peaks and troughs. The likelihood of client companies spending thousands on a pop-up mail shot when their own prospects are on holiday is slim. The notion that a company might want an interactive mailer to land on a customer’s desk on the week either side of Easter is equally unlikely. The chances of someone planning a B2B promotion that will arrive the week before Christmas or at any time from then until the second week of the New Year are quite remote.

We might have 52 weeks in a year but realistically there are no more than 40 which are regarded as good for targetting B2B promotions for general business. On the other hand, of course, we have a totally disproportionate amount of enquiries for Christmas marketing projects which will run prior to mid December so that compensates a little.

However, thinking about all thgis has made me depressed so I think I might take a short break for a couple of days!