Keeping it personal: business ideas that promote customised products

Personalised designs and gifts are an extremely popular gift item for holiday seasons and birthdays, but custom designs are also used to brand a business’s tools and uniforms to suit different needs. For example, a school might seek out personalised shirts and order team uniforms for their sporting group. They’ll customise it to display the school emblem, numbers, and perhaps even the names of the players.

There are many online businesses that promote personalization and customisation. After all, buying a cup or blanket with a standard design is nowhere near as interesting as editing it to display your favourite characters or phrases.

A personalised gift shop doesn’t need many tools either. Some professional screen printing software and blank template products are all you need. You can create software for users to edit designs online and have your machines do all the work for you. It’s a great option for a startup company and the internet is full of opportunities for this type of business. Here are some examples of the type of customisation and products you can sell.

Promotional Merchandise

If you have enough funds to invest in a commercial scale business, then you could start up a company that specialises in wholesale merchandise design. This type of business is aimed towards large institutes and corporations that require branded designs for things such as pens, paper, computers, keyboards or uniforms.

You’ll have to take on large orders, but the quality of your product is a key factor here. Your option is to either have very standard and basic designs so that you can print them en masse for budget-conscious businesses, or create detailed designs with the help of professional artists so that you can mingle with more prestigious clients.

Tech vs Wearables and Accessories

Unless you’re running a general gift store with lots of useful items, it’s best to focus on either creative designs or industrial choices. For example, you can specialise in creating decals and custom hardware such as USB flash drives, mice and keyboards. This would be aimed towards a business or corporate use. Tech items can get expensive, so ordering large quantities of blank templates will get very costly.

If you prefer to target mainstream consumers, then you can purchase blank template shirts, mobile phone covers and other accessories to customise. The different here is that you need sophisticated software so that your users can design their items with a great amount of detail. It’s a choice between getting involved with customers or targeting corporate clients.

Partnering With Artists

The internet is brimming with passionate and talented artists that are itching to get their work noticed. You can partner up with professional and amateur artists alike and create products that will showcase their work.

Some of the most common ideas are shirts, phone cases, and mouse pads, but you can also extend to creating large works of art by transferring their designs onto canvases, bags and posters. Creating a partnership with an up and coming artist is a two-way relationship that can benefit you both—the artist will get their work noticed, and you’ll have some amazing products to sell.

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