Marketing products is our forte as you may already know but did you know that we also produce products for local authorities and tourist boards?  The eyeleted discs we supply for recycling and parking discs are all of a premium quality, hard-wearing and easy to use.

Smart and Easy to View Wheels Encourage Recycling 

The popupmailers Recycling Wheels are a boon to local authority departments who are battling with residents to change their philosophy on rubbish and encourage as much recycling as possible. Since the products are easy to use, very sturdy and neat they aid education about “what goes where, when and how”. You can if you so wish (and many do) choose to have photographs on your recycling wheel to make the instructions even easier to use.  Orders for the recycling wheels are racing past the post for the most popular local authority products we produce.

Top Class Parking Discs and Permits 

We produce millions of Parking Discs each year for numerous local authorities and we adhere to BSI specifications here in the UK.  Smaller versions are favoured in the European market. Whatever you need we can manufacture a hard-wearing, easy to use and cost effective disc that will work well for you and your parking schemes. Parking Permits are now widely used and we have been involved in producing lots of permits with clocks for local councils and privately owned car parks too.

Little Big Cards and Foldilocks for Tourism Leaflets

Currently in the best selling chart for Local Government and Independent Tourism Boards are the Little big Card and Foldilocks Designs.  Both make perfect mini booklets and are pocket sized too making them easy to carry and keep for a future visit. The Little Big Card lends itself perfectly to hosting a map inside two sturdy covers whilst the Foldilocks is printed on panels which make ideal tear-off vouchers or coupons for loyalty discounts and return visits.

Hand-finishing a Speciality

If you are a printing company you may need your products eyeleting and hand-finishing - we can do that too. 

For more information about local authority products see popupmailers

Traditional Recycling Wheels, Parking Discs and Permits are popular products, however you may not have realised that the list of possibilities for using Wheel Charts is endless.  Wheel Charts or Disc Spinners as they are also known make superb direct mail promotional products and information wheels for almost anything!

Calculating Idea is “wheely” Successful

The Information Discs have earned a wonderful reputation for many companies - success stories include a well known Slimming Organisation as a calorie counter, insurance companies and pension providers as an easy to read calculation chart. A wheel is currently in use as a colour chart for a famous paint manufacturer. The wheel charts and disc spinners are available in different designs, with different numbers of discs and are all finished to the highest spec.

What Goes Where Wheels

In these times of recycle mania local government offices have found the Recycling Discs a boon for easily advising their residents of what goes where in such a way that encourages more people to recycle. In some cases photographs are used rather than text and this has been well received by communities with lots of elderly residents. The Recycling Discs are hard wearing, bright and easy to read – adding a hook so that they can be hung up in the kitchen is another novel idea adopted by some local authorities.

Parking Permits and Discs

Disc Parking for Local authorities is becoming more prevalent and the Parking Discs and Permits are very sturdy and easy to read and set.  They last a long time and do the job perfectly for you. There are rules and regulations regarding design in some authorities, however there are ample opportunities for advertising space aswell in some cases.

Hang out your Washing with a Door Hanger Wheel Chart

The Laundry Wheel Chart in the shape of a Door Hanger is taking off so well in the Hotel Industry.  Conscious about water consumption most Hotels require guests to request Laundry Services only when absolutely necessary and what better way than with this novel and easy to use design. A prestigious hotel chain is re-ordering more as I write this blog.

For more ideas see the website popupmailers

I am sure that the majority of households get confused by exactly what goes in which bin! I am also sure that the majority of households no longer have the leaflet that was sent out and maybe some never opened it. This is likely to happen because the leaflet cannot be displayed; it is not interesting or interactive and will therefore stand a very slim chance of being kept.

For public information products holding this valuable information it needs to be completely fuss free and it needs to be simple. Whitney Woods now has a great alternative for National Governments, local authorities and county councils that will make recycling within the households and workplaces a breeze.

Take a look at our Recycling Information Disks. These are made completely with the user in mind for everyone who may struggle to see or read the ‘what goes where wheel’ makes it much easier to understand. We can easily supply these wheels with a little chain so it can be hung in a convenient place extending the life of the information and making sure your recycling is right every time. To see where your litter goes just turn the wheel and it will tell you what colour bin including a picture; this also makes it more memorable for the customer. The turning mechanism makes it interactive for the customer holding their attention and even gaining interest in what the card is showing. The card also has plenty of space to print useful numbers and addresses to make the process even smoother.

This product is a win win situation for all. Make life simple by introducing this product to improve communication with the public and we can even mail them out for you, no fuss, no confusion bring your information leaflets in to the future.

As our daily blog seems to focus almost entirely on advertising and marketing subjects it is easy to overlook the day to day work activities that led Whitney Woods to become a leading manufacturer of pop-ups and interactive promotional products.

When the company was formed in 1992 the business was made up of two divisions. One was a mailing house and the other was print finishing by hand and both are still fully functional operations today. It was the dextrous skills of our hand-finishing team that led to the assembly of pop-ups and interactive products. The same team also provides an eyeletting service to the print industry and this year we expect to assemble millions of wheel charts not only for our marketing customers but also for the print industry.

Our mailing house services are used by many local companies as well as by a large number of our marketing customers who commission us to send out the promotional mailers that we have made for them. Our direct mail website is currently undergoing a redesign and will be sporting a brand new look in a couple of weeks time. The current site looks very dated and tired and needs to be freshened up to be more in line with our popupmailers and whitneywoods websites. Other sites also need to be brought up to date so our new web designer, Kate Pollitt at Kreate Graphics is going to be busy!

The amount of business that we receive for our hand finishing business has dwindled over the years, particularly with the UK’s oversubscribed print industry having experienced a very hard time in the recession. Printers have been running below full capacity for some time now and so they have tended to do whatever they can in-house rather than sub-contractiong their work to outfits such as ours.

Our eyeletting services division has fared better. The recession has killed off some of the competition in the eyeletting services market and we have picked up new business as a result of the unfortunate circumstances of others.

In the quest to gain new customers through creative direct mail it is possible to over-egg the pudding by trying to be too clever. There are certain attributes that are very desirable in a mail shot but it is easy to go too far in trying to achieve certain goals. For example, customer interaction is a terrific commodity in B2B direct marketing but if it is not immediately obvious how the interaction works then spontaneity goes out of the window and the opportunity can be lost. Marketing professionals are well advised to keep things simple but nonetheless entertaining.

In order to turn an information sheet into a simple, interactive information tool with an obvious interaction, designers need to look no further than towards a simple stationery eyelet as a tool to provide many answers. This point is best illustrated if we take a look at circular information charts.

Circular Information Discs are Popular Promotional Tools

The main problem with this type of product is that no-one knows what they are called - wheel charts, information discs, calculators, roundels and spinners are just a few of the more common names. Whatever you may call them doesn’t alter the basic fact that they are very popular information tools that are used to promote a myriad of products. They are usually made up of either two or three discs custom printed in full colour and fastened at the centre with a metal eyelet. The eyelet allows the discs to turn around the central point in order to locate certain items of information. The top disc usually has a window or aperture through which it is easy to read information. This info can be the answer to a question, technical data or a list of products for example. Whatever it is, the reader has to interact with the disc in order to read it and so the disc becomes a good product for B2B direct marketing.

Another product that has promotional uses and that is similar to the information discs described above is a product that is familiar in the UK and many parts of Europe and that is a parking disc. In the UK in particular, such products are often used as promotion items produced on behalf of the auto industry and targeted at the motorist.

The simple metal eyelet is also at the heart of other promotional items. Take, for example, a set of information cards.

Fan-like Display Created by Eyelet Fastener

Swatch cards, also known as fan cards and information cards, are printed, die-cut, collated and fastened in one corner using a metal eyelet so that they open like a hand-held ladies fan. Such cards come in a variety of shapes and in sizes, usually from credit card size to A5 and are generally printed in full colour on 300gsm art board or a similar substrate.

There are other ways to use metal eyelets in the creation of movement and one example is to use two eyelets to present a motion similar to that produced by a fly wheel or a camshaft. The product is usually presented as a sleeve with the mechanics on the inside. A wheel at the side of the sleeve is fastened at the centre and is turned in an even, circular motion by the user. Within the sleeve, a die-cut piece is connected to the wheel by a long shaft which is eyeletted to the wheel in an off-centre position. When the wheel is turned, the shaft moves up and down with it but as the die-cut piece is held within a slot, the movement is somewhat irregular - like a “bobbing” motion. With the use of creative graphics, the die-cut piece can be made to look like a duck or a boat bobbing along in water.