In today’s competitive marketplace, standing out and making a lasting impression is more critical than ever. Companies are constantly seeking innovative ways to connect with their audience, and one strategy that has always been effective is to use custom promotional merchandise. Choosing between different products and adding logos and other graphics allows you to create a visual representation of your brand, which can have a big impact. Clothing is especially popular here, given its other applications.
Among the various options, custom hoodies are one of the most powerful tools for brand building. Comfortable, stylish, and versatile, hoodies offer a unique canvas for showcasing your brand’s identity while fostering a sense of loyalty and community among customers. This article explores how businesses can leverage custom hoodies to enhance their brand presence, create meaningful connections, and drive long-term success.
Why Promotional Merchandise?
As we’ve mentioned, promotional merch allows you to shape the image of your brand and get it out there, even to those who aren’t yet consumers of your primary product. Trying to sell your software to someone who’s never heard of you might be difficult, but everyone uses water bottles, t-shirts and tote bags, so you can use these to create awareness before moving in for the sale.
Long-Lasting Advertising
With other forms of advertising, you have to pay every time. Ask Google to leave your ads up after you stop paying, and they won’t even dignify it with a response. When you give out promo products, though, they keep getting impressions long after you’ve bought them.
There are conditions of course. Your products need to be good quality– if they’re not, they won’t be used for as long, and can give off the wrong impression of your company. Get the products right and you can get yourself months, or even years, of free advertising.
Brand Loyalty
Other forms of advertising feel invasive– we feel as if someone’s interrupting whatever we were trying to do, to give us a message we don’t want. We often immediately have a bad impression of a company when we see their advertising.
If you give people quality, useful products, you get the opposite effect. The company isn’t taking your time, it’s giving you something. So you start off on the front foot. You can also combine promo products with influencer marketing– another method which has become popular, partly for being less invasive.
Why Promotional Apparel?
A huge number of different items can make great promo products, and we’re certainly not saying there’s no place for branded water bottles, pens and the like. Clothing has some advantages over other products though, which is why it’s so popular.
Widespread Use
For one thing, everyone wears clothes. More than that, everyone moves around in clothes. A lot of promotional merchandise sits on a desk for most of its life, or at home. While it’s certainly true that many branded t-shirts rarely leave the bedroom – let alone the house – if you can make stylish branded clothing of good quality, many recipients will wear it out in public, which is where you get all your free impressions.
Uniforms & Team Building
We all like to be able to kill two birds with one stone, and making your promo items, your uniforms, and your kits for team-building events, can be done in one go. Uniforms are essential for any customer-facing business that wants to look professional. They also help to foster unity within the group.
Even if your staff don’t wear a uniform, having clothing they were given when they started, or during a team-building event, makes them feel part of the team straight away. Wearing the same clothing can help to bring down barriers people might imagine between themselves and more senior staff. Increasing the sense of togetherness in your company is always a great way to boost employee morale and staff retention.
Why Hoodies?
Again, there’s plenty of different apparel you can use for promotion, and we’ve nothing against caps or t-shirts. But there are some things that hoodies have over these other choices.
Practicality
Hoodies are practical garments. They’re warm, comfy, and they cover your head if it rains. This is why they became popular in the first place, with both factory workers and athletes. Practical clothing is not just great for your staff, it also gives off a good impression when used for promotional reasons.
Visibility
Your branding gets great visibility with hoodies. You have a nice big space to print on, and they’re an outer layer, so are rarely covered up by other clothing. Also, they’re an item that people tend to own fewer of. With t-shirts, it’s more likely they’ll be forgotten, but if you give someone a quality hoodie, they’re unlikely to waste it, so you should get significantly more impressions.
Inclusivity
Hoodies are the most inclusive garment. Everyone wears them, they’re in fashion, but not too much. While you can get cropped hoodies and other styles which aren’t for some people, go for a relaxed fit and they work just as well whatever your gender or body type. This has many advantages: you make your staff or the public feel included, you project a fantastic image of your company, and you don’t have to buy different styles for different people– just a few different sizes will be enough.
Modernity
This is more subjective, you might not have hoodies as part of your uniform if you’re a law firm. But for customer-facing businesses that want to give off a modern, progressive image, they’re perfect. For behind-the-scenes staff, hoodies give the image of a more relaxed, fun place to work, and one that values employee welfare. ‘Relaxed’ is a term that many bosses don’t like in the workplace, but more and more we are seeing that a more relaxed atmosphere doesn’t necessarily mean lower productivity, and that the benefits of lower stress levels and staff retention make it worth it.
Availability
Hoodies are easy to get hold of, and come in a huge range of styles, colors, and materials. This helps you get the perfect one for your brand image. The variety of materials is important for printing, seeing as different methods work better with different materials. While the price may be higher than for some other promo products, they are still fairly affordable. When you buy in bulk, they become even more so.
What to Use Promo Hoodies for
If you’re now convinced that branded hoodies are a great idea for your company, you’ll be wanting to get the maximum benefit from them, so here are some of the different ways you can use them:
Uniforms
As we said before, this one will depend on the type of company you are, but if it fits with the image you’re trying to project, outfitting your staff in hoodies is a great way to keep them wrapped up. Seeing as hoodies are such a great item to own, you may find people keep wearing them even after they’ve left the company. More free advertising for you!
Onboarding & Team Building
A brilliant way to increase office unity. Give them out at staff events, or to new employees, and you bring your team together, generate loyalty to your company, and give them something to wear when the air-con’s up too high. The inclusive, relaxed atmosphere we discussed in the previous section is particularly relevant here.
Customer Giveaways
Depending on your budget, hoodies might be too expensive to give away to hundreds of customers, or potential customers, all at once. To be honest though, this scattergun approach to marketing isn’t so popular anymore, because it seems (and is) so wasteful. Giving them away as prizes at events though, or as rewards for repeat customers, is a much more economical way to do it, and can also generate demand through scarcity.
Charity Events
Back to killing two birds with one stone. Sponsoring charity events is a fantastic way to do some good while you promote your brand. And what better way to do so than by making clothing for them? Tie your brand to a good cause, keep the charity workers warm and looking great, give them a token to remember the day, and get plenty more impressions in the future.
Retail
You may be a company that sells hoodies, you may be an art or design company that needs canvases to sell their artwork, you may have nothing to do with hoodies, but need souvenirs, or have loyal customers who are proud to show off their brand allegiance. There are many reasons to sell hoodies with different designs on, whatever yours may be, you can take advantage of hoodies to sell something almost everyone wears, and something that lasts, giving you and your customers a great return on your investments.
How to Make Promotional Hoodies
Our sharper readers may have guessed by now that we’ll be offering you a way to make your branded hoodies. You’re free to use anyone you like of course, but we do have a couple of things going for us:
- For great branded products you need two things– quality blanks, and a printer. At Wordans you can do both things together, saving you time and money. If you’re not sure what the best brands are for blank hoodies, you can compare them in this article.
- Our variety makes it easy to find the style, material, and color you want– just use our filters to narrow down your search. Our prices are always great, but we also have different options there, to cover for every budget. We have printers for every method, so whether you want embroidery, screen printing, or another method, you won’t have a problem. Check out this guide if you’re not sure what’s right for you.
- Our pricing means that there’s no minimum order, but you get discounts when you order more, this means you always get the best price possible, however big or small your business is– check out the pricing table for your chosen hoodie to see how many you need to order for an extra discount.
- Our custom tool is so easy to use. You can add text, or upload any designs you want as an image file, and then see how it will look straight away. Products with the blue ‘customize it’ tag can be customized with our tool. For others, you can still customize by completing the form to contact our sales team.
Time to Get Started?
If you agree that promotional hoodies can help take your brand to the next level, then there’s no time like the present to start creating. Try it out today to see just how simple it is.
We hope this inspires you to keep your business moving forward, and that making some awesome hoodies plays a part in that. Check out our website for any blank and custom apparel, or other promo products you might need. Our Instagram has more ideas for you if you’d like to take a look at @wearewordans.
