The end and the beginning of the year is always a bit messy for me. End of the year most of the world is in the holiday mood and not much is happening. Then the new year kicks off with industry trade shows taking me to PSI in Europe and this year also to PPAI in the United States. The shows and the meetings at them result in lots of follow up work, unfortunately that has to wait. Why ? Because another holiday season starts right after - Chinese New Year … This year all got a bit more complicated by the severe weather in China but now it is time for the things to get back to normal again.

So what a person like me has to do once the festive season is over ?

• Recalculation of prices of all the products our clients buy regularly, a real headache of a job

• Finalizing development and sampling and testing of new products

• Follow up of all the stuff that came up during the January trade shows and meetings

• Visits to suppliers to facilitate the above

• Getting ready for the April trade shows in Asia - travel and hotel arrangements for customers, booth and showcase arrangements for us

• And in between getting rid of the mountains of correspondence that piled up during the weeks I was more away from than in the office

I love the holidays, but I hate what comes after them

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I believe it was in January 2001 when I went to Dallas to visit the PPAI Show. Those were the old days before the show moved to Las Vegas. The things on display were the usual mix of pens, wearables, trophies, drinkware, basically the classic promotional product selection we were all used to.

Among all of the above we found some sort of laces. They were all over the place and there were quite a few companies displaying the laces and nothing else. We wondering what the hell is this for and how can a company make living by selling only this weird stuff .

So few days and few drinks later we decided that if such a funny thing like lanyard (by now we knew the proper name) can sell big in the USA, we should be able to sell it in Europe too.

It took a while but we found some manufacturers. The problem was not that they did not exist. The problem was that outside USA those days no one seemed to know what is lanyard, so it was not easy to explain what we are looking for .

After finding the supplier, we prepared some basic collection of different widths, different attachments and worked out costing for different quantities and branding technologies. Lanyards received nice full page in the new catalog, and …

… nothing happened. In the whole first year we made one order, 500 pcs . Such an instant hit these things became . But a year later, the hell broke loose. All of a sudden the lanyards became a must have for everybody. Not as a promotional product, bus as trendy fashion accessory. Massive 2.5 cm (1 inch) wide lanyards were the hottest ones to have … We were glad we were prepared, prepared way too in advance .

These days the lanyards are back where they belong. No longer a hot fashion accessory, but a useful product with prominent logo placement. In the old days all the trade show badges or employee cards and IDs were hanging on simple strings. Now the string is gone and lanyards are in (still). Here are few examples of use:

• Corporate Identity - It is much cheaper to hang company branded lanyard on the neck of each employee than buy uniforms for everybody.

• Events - Entrance tickets, conference passes, trade show badges - All these are often required to be visible on person all the time and that means on the neck these days. The branded lanyards replaced the older strings and even better, the safety pins from the days when it was common to pin the badge on one’s shirt.

• Sponsorship messages - Especially during the events, the lanyards often bear logos not only of the event itself but also of the sponsors. The lanyard is long enough to repeat one logo several times, or to alternate several logos over the length of the lanyard.

• Merchandising - The licensed merchandise is not cheap. Many people would love to have some souvenir after visiting a theme park or a sports match or a museum. Most of the shops these days carry lanyards and people do buy them. Maybe not because they are that great, but because the price makes them relatively affordable when compared to a piece of garment for example.

• Products Accessories - Branded with main product brand and used as camera holders, mobile phone straps (shorter versions also, as wrist straps), binoculars, flashligths …

The lanyards come in different materials (nylon, polyester, satin, cotton…), with different brand applications (print, jacquard, sublimation), with different accessories (clips, phone holders, safety breakaways). The most common widths are 1.5 - 2 cm (5/8 - 3/4″).

Did you know that some of the largest lanyard factories producing millions per year used to make shoe laces just few years back ?

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The garment suppliers, especially the bigger brands, are quite popular at the trade shows because of their giveaways. It is usually just a T-shirt but from time to time they change a strategy. This year at the PSI show Stedman (by Hanes) went for a watch.

This Stedman giveaway package is a good example of how a low budget premium can be produced without looking cheap.

This relatively low cost but decent plastic watch is packed in a nicely made gift box together with a small tool. If you wonder what is the tool for - well, it makes it easier for people to adjust the size of the wristband . The box also comes with CD containing the product catalog.

This style of watch is not my cup of tea but there are definitely enough people who would not mind getting one. And quite a few people lined up in Stedman’s booth to get it . I believe that if a gift manages to draw the attention at the PSI Show, where all the visitors are people who make living selling gimmicks like this, it is probably a good one …

It also serves as a good alternative to a printed catalog. Does not cost much more than a thick catalog but especially if given away at the trade show it is likely to have greater impact. A standalone CD catalog is quite easily lost or misplaced. A CD catalog packed in gift set like this will probably make it back with the potential buyers .

I have one gift box with the watch to give away to BizGiftGuru readers. Simply leave a comment below this article with your opinion on this mini gift pack. I will pick one lucky commentator next Monday and send him/her the watch. Even if you may not like it yourself, there will sure be someone around you happy to wear it .

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About a year ago we had a booth at a large trade show. The weeks before the show were quite busy for us and the exhibition preparations did suffer a bit. At the end we did manage to arrange nice booth set up but we overlooked one thing. Yes, you can guess, we overlooked our own give away goodies for the visitors . We still had left few hundred lanyards we used to give out in the past, but I was not too keen to use them again. We have used them for several shows already and I was becoming bored with them. But as there was nothing else, we had to do with them yet again.

Although we overlooked our tiny little gifts for the visitors, we did prepare quite nice and expensive catalog with our new product line. While the catalogs are printed to be distributed, I do hate when people who will never even look inside them collect them from the booth, just for the sake of collecting them. Waste of paper and money down the drain. Moreover, the catalogs run out pretty fast that way and by the end of the show there are none for the people who are genuinely interested. This happens no matter how many catalogs you bring to the show.

So, on one side we had lanyards as a giveaway we did not really find exciting any more, on the other side a pile of catalogs we wanted to distribute without wasting them. And then the idea came…

We took one of the photos from the catalog (not showing the products themselves, but a colorful and attractive photo) and the theme from the catalog cover. We designed a sort of a name card with the photo and our contact info and the website on one side, the catalog cover theme on the other. We had few hundred of these printed in a 12 hour print shop with a hole punched through at the top of the card.

In the booth we attached the cards to our old lanyards and placed them on a display where they were kind of screaming “Take Me !”. And people were taking them like crazy … The colorful design of the card proved to be very attractive and was actually drawing people into our booth. I could not believe it . Moreover, we could afford to display only one or two of our catalogs as a browsing copies. To our old customers or very serious visitors we gave the catalogs, most of the walk in buyers were happy just to take the contact info on the lanyard with card. Those who were serious enough and contacted us after the show received the catalogs by mail.

This is how a small colourful card turned a leftover giveaway into accidental hero

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After several years of date collisions between the PSI Fair in Germany and PPAI Fair in the United States, this year the schedule finally provided me with an opportunity to visit both fairs in the same year. So I took off from Germany on Friday, landed back in Hong Kong on Saturday and tried to nurse my jet lag for 2 days (without much success). Tuesday I took of for Las Vegas and thanks to the time difference being the same as the journey I arrived in Vegas the same day and pretty much the same hour I left Hong Kong. Dead tired, but ready.

This has been my 3rd visit to the PPAI Show, but the first one since 2001. The last time I went I discovered what lanyard is :-), the product now as common as a ball pen but virtually unknown those days. Well, except it was all over the PPAI Show back in 2001 … So I was quite curious to see how the show, the exhibitors, the products have evolved. I also wanted to see what the location change did to the PPAI Show, as last time went the show was still in Dallas.

Same as the PSI Show in Dusseldorf, Germany, the PPAI Show is open to the PPAI (Promotional Products Association International) members only. Vast majority of the exhibitors are suppliers, most of the visitors are the distributors. For the suppliers this is an opportunity to present their new product lines, distribute new catalogs, meet up with their distributors.

The first thing I realized when walking the fair was that the size of the booths seems to have shrunk. I am not sure whether it is a result of an effort to accommodate more exhibitors or a result of some cost saving measures from the exhibitors. This also lead to changes in the design of the booths, nothing really spectacular I must say. People who visit this fair every year may not have realized this, but after 7 year break the difference is very obvious.

When it comes to products on exhibit the biggest changes I have spotted is the lack of US made products. There still are some, but not as many as there used to be back in 2000 and 2001. It is understandable that production shifts to the places with lower production cost, but the same forces work in Europe too and one can still see lots of products made in Germany, made in Italy, made in Switzerland at the PSI show.

Very useful feature of the PPAI Show is New Products hall.

Ween I walked in I felt like I am at some sort of flea market (without the sellers being present). But this simple set up is very practical. Not all the products on display were new things, but they might have been new for the exhibitors displaying them. Still quite a few new products, new ways of packaging and most importantly applications of new technologies especially in printing were on display.

The fact that the booth sizes were not as big and designs as spectacular as they used to be does not mean there is nothing to see. On the contrary. One has to look hard and know what to look for (like at most of the trade shows) but the fair is definitely worth the visit. Even though I could not see anything totally new and groundbreaking this time, it was a fruitful visit. I was not coming as a buyer or a seller but as an observer. And those 3 days I spent at the fair helped me a lot to get clearer image about the current situation on BizGift market in the United States (and Canada to certain extent).

The PPAI show is more than an exhibition though. The show program includes development workshops, seminars, keynote luncheons, fashion and accessories show. The highlight of the entertainment program this year was the ONE party that included a concert by the rock band Daughtry. I unfortunately had no time to attend any of these events…

It has been several years since the PPAI Show moved from Dallas to Las Vegas, but only this year I got a chance to see myself whether it helped the overall experience or not. Oh yes, it definitely did help . Those who have been to Vegas will understand, those who are yet to try should go and see.

Here are few more photos from the 2008 PPAI Show.

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