Branded Merchandise: How to Balance Budget, Quality, and Quantity

With more than 85% of worldwide consumers having received a merchandised item from a company indicating they remember the brand name following, it’s clear that promotional products should be included as a tactic in your brand marketing strategy.

Getting started with ordering branded merchandise can be overwhelming. You’re dealing with unfamiliar fabrics, materials, or products and then conversing in terms such as units and cost price while ordering units in the thousands. This is all happening within the framework of specific business goals, such as reinforcing brand values, delivering a level of quality perception with the product, or ordering specific quantities within a set budget or timeframe.  

Finding Your Branded Merchandise Partner 

We know how important it is to balance budget, quality, and quantity when ordering branded merchandise. Here are our tried-and-true tips for helping you achieve the end result you are searching for: 

• Choose a Trusted Partner: It all starts with working with a reliable provider. Choose a trusted partner who takes the time to get to know your business and understand the goals you are looking to achieve with your merchandise order of branded products.
• Understand Your Consumers: Your company caters to a specific consumer with the products or services it is looking to sell. With this in mind, it’s important that you know what your customer wants so that you can align your product choice with their needs.
• Product Choice: Determining your target market (such as employees, clients or customers) aligns your product choice with items your consumers will use every day. If you’re in the wine and liquor industry, consider custom branded apparel such as t-shirts, hoodies, or leggings. If you’re a tech company, consider items such as earbuds or backpacks. Once you know the product you are aiming for, you can begin exploring how you will balance budget, quality, and quantity to achieve your goals.

Tips for Balancing Budget, Quality and Quantity when Ordering Branded Merchandise

As a company founded by engineers, engineering processes are applied to project management throughout our divisions which span creative and production. In engineering, you isolate the constraints, then figure out the variables for the best solution. When it comes to balancing budget, quality, and quantity while ordering branded merchandise, our approach is no different.

Budget 

If a client has a set budget which they can’t exceed, the variables are going to be quantity and quality. The main objective must be not to lead clients as to what they should order, but to instead ask the questions that determine what metrics are most important to the client. From there, work begins to fulfill those needs. If the budget is set at a specific price point, then you can anticipate needing to work within set parameters on quality and/ or quantity. 

Quality 

Often, client’s need the unit cost of an item to lie below a certain threshold. An example of when this might apply is when the client is looking to resell the goods at a higher price point,such as in a brand shopfront, or where the trade value, such as an email in return for a promotional item, has a value equal to or less than the price point per unit. With these examples, quality may also be important because the quality of the product has a direct reflection of the brand. In this case, you would look to achieve both higher quality, as well as the needed price per unit, by increasing the total quantity ordered at one time 

Quantity 

The balance to the above, is that some clients might need a specific number of units, while having flexibility in unit price or quality. When that’s the case, your vendor should strive to fit what’s most important to you – quantity. The right vendor knows that within a given price, you can have equal measures of quality and quantity, ensuring the products meet your exact brand standards.

Branded merchandise is a low-cost marketing tactic which can increase your brand’s visibility when used effectively. By choosing the right merchandise item, you can engage and delight consumers, creating a lasting impression of your brand. To balance budget, quality, and quantity, work with a trusted partner who has proven experience delivering projects on time, within budget, and in exceeding client expectations. Knowing your goals will help your partner deliver merchandise which is memorable and actively engages your consumers and by evaluating each of the above variables you will be able to create branded merchandise which expertly shares your brand story for years to come.

First published on 02.08.2019 – updated on 09.15.2021