7 ½ Mistakes You’re Making When Buying Personalized Products
Learn how to overcome these mistakes and order products like a pro.
When it comes to ordering personalized products like name badges, name plates, business cards, and more for your business or organization, you may think it’s a pretty straightforward process.
Find an online vendor, pick your products, upload your names, and call it a day, right?
Wrong!
The LoneStar Badge & Sign team has been helping businesses across dozens of industries find the high-quality personalized products their teams need since 1982, which means we’ve learned a few things along the way.
Here are seven (and a half) of the most common mistakes we see customers make before they start working with us:
- Not using them to reinforce your brand
- Prioritizing cost over durability
- Not using a corporate ordering portal
- Allowing mistakes to slip through
- Forgetting to buy required accessories
- Using poor quality graphics and text
- Not working with a vendor that holds your hand throughout the entire process
7 ½. Putting up with headaches
Think you’re making any of these mistakes? Let’s learn how to fix them!
Not using them to reinforce your brand
An employee’s name and job title shouldn’t be the only way you customize a name badge or plate. With LoneStar, you get your choice of dozens of colors, fonts, designs, images, and more! Upload your logo, or customize a product to reflect your company colors or the overall look you’re trying to achieve.
With our online store, you have an almost endless array of design choices to make your products stand out and communicate your organization’s brand.
Prioritizing cost over durability
Name badges, lanyards, and badge reels can take a beating. Think about it: They have to withstand getting bumped and pulled on throughout the day, put on and taken off on a daily basis, and sometimes even tossed in the wash. Yikes!
It’s good to know the name and ID badges and accessories you select are made from quality, durable materials that can withstand the usual wear and tear. You won’t get that when you go for the cheapest options you find online, so look for a quality vendor like LoneStar.
When you do eventually need to replace a badge, it should also be an easy, stress-free process. This leads us to our next mistake…
Not using a corporate ordering portal
What’s a corporate ordering portal, you ask? Only the key to making ordering personalized products completely effortless!
Our custom corporate portals are designed to meet any challenges you face in ordering and distributing personalized products to your team. Maybe you have multiple locations, each with its own name badge requirements and designs. Or perhaps you work for a large educational institution, where students and staff are responsible for purchasing their own badges and lanyards.
Whatever your unique case may be, a corporate ordering portal is the answer. Learn more about LoneStar’s corporate ordering portals here.
Allowing mistakes to slip through
Mistakes happen – it’s how often they happen and how your vendor responds to them that matters.
At LoneStar, we’ll work with you to ensure the information you provide us is accurate, so each product comes out the way you expect it. And if a slip-up does happen on our end or yours, we do everything in our power to make it right and keep you happy as a customer.
Forgetting to buy required accessories
You have your name badges ordered, but how will your team members wear them? Perhaps you have your vinyl decals all picked out but don’t have a squeegee to apply them with.
Whatever the case, you shouldn’t have to look far and wide for the accessories to make your personalized products work great. At LoneStar, you’ll find everything you need right in our online store. We’re also happy to make recommendations for accessories like badge reels, pins, clips, and more.
Using poor quality graphics and text
Whether it’s a pixelated logo or a photo where an employee’s face isn’t lit well, a lackluster graphic can completely ruin a personalized product. This is another place where our online design studio and team of pros can help – we can walk you through the design process to make sure the graphics you supply us with will look amazing on your products.
We also publish a blog full of helpful tips on designing business cards, taking great ID photos, and more so you can learn on the go and create the best products possible.
The same advice goes for high-quality, readable text. People shouldn’t have to invade your employees’ personal space to read their badge or get within six inches of a sign to see what it says.
When designing your badge, make sure you’re not overloading it with text or using too small a font. To avoid this, use an online design studio (like ours!) or enlist the help of an expert design team (we have that too!) to make sure your products can be clearly read from a few feet away.
Not working with a vendor that holds your hand throughout the entire process
You should never have to go it alone when buying personalized products for your organization. By working with a professional team with decades of experience, you can guarantee there will be no guesswork or uncertainty during the ordering process.
We’ll work with you every step of the way, from deciding which products are the best fit for you and sourcing additional products or designs from one of our partners, to designing your products and making sure they get delivered to you quickly and error-free.
Putting up with headaches
Ordering personalized products should be fun, not headache-inducing! And putting up with even slight headaches or annoyances can build over time until they become a major hassle.
Put down the ibuprofen, stop making the mistake of tolerating poor service and inconveniences, and find relief with LoneStar Badge & Sign!
You can get started today by browsing our online store or contacting our team to learn more about setting up a corporate ordering portal, requesting samples, and how we can overcome your business’ unique challenges.