ImagesMagUK_November_2021

speciality garment features to simply more creative interpretations, this means that you can also start increasing your value perception and demanding higher prices by deviating from established standards. Although quality and complexity can – and should – be part of the value/price discussion, increasing your own perceived value rarely requires a 1:1 correlation with increased cost on your part. With this in mind, here are three simple ways you can increase perceived value in your own products and help your customer solve the problem of how their products will stand apart. Packaging impressions A customer’s first experience of your product is in opening the package – folding shirts in bundles into their original, beat-up box with no additional preparation sends a message: ‘This is a commodity, important only in quantity.’ Change that discussion by individually folding garments and adding brand- specific hangtags, or size taping. Individually bagging and using branded boxes, or at least adding branding to the boxes you use, further increases brand exposure and the sense of care. Moreover, you should offer packaging with customers’ brand assets to aid in marketing to their end user. These actions send the message that the important unit is the single piece. It is ‘retail’. Each piece is valuable enough to receive attention. Add to this the increased value an end customer ascribes to packaging, particularly when that packaging is well-designed and decorated in an interesting or novel way, or adds additional value as you might see in items like the ‘sticker hangtag’ that offers the end user a branded sticker to go with their garment. Although these add costs to any job, the sense of care and quality means that you can charge more than just a standard mark-up on these additional assets and labour. Make sure at the minimum that no garment is rumpled, lint-covered or otherwise dishevelled when it leaves your shop. Every garment is an ambassador of your value, but never forget to offer more to your customer. Tag and brand any samples shown to customers to drive this home. Design and digitising There’s no reason that you must abide by boring design. When having designs digitised or speccing out a new print, suggest bold concepts to your customers and back them up with sample images. Although this again comes with an increase in effort or expenditure on your part, hiring out more skilled design or embroidery digitising work only increases the cost on a particular image once, and doesn’t necessarily increase the cost of the decoration itself. Whether you have a designer work up a unique concept or you hire an embroidery digitiser who creates dimensional executions that make the most of your art, the printing or stitching can still adhere to your usual expectations. In the case of embroidery, a skilled digitiser is also usually able to make your embroidery more efficient and less dense, leading to a better look, softer hand, and less time on the machine. Smaller increases in up-front costs can create a much better look to the finished piece. For designs that will be reused, the cost makes even less impact over a customer’s lifetime orders. Beyond that, your ability to harness skilled art staff adds an air of quality to your work that increases customer trust in your product and perception of the quality of the delivered goods, even if they are created with the same garments and materials used by your competition. Novelty and new combinations Present something new, whether that’s a new type of garment, decoration Simple hooded sweatshirts emblazoned with art from a cherished YouTuber can fetch prices at multiples of what we’d expect from retail sales Value can stem from knowing your market; in the case of these totes, the design features an in-joke reference to the obscurity of the instrument represented through the phonetic spelling, and the bag used for this folk-music project was selected to fit common music book formats and to stand up decently due to its gusseted – a valuable property for the musicians who stash them next to their chairs at practices and jam sessions. Knowing audience needs and creating to their tastes as well as including inside references can create trust Attention in the design phase pays off; the usual method for rendering rhinestones often relies on a single size of stone and automated placement, but in this piece hand-tuning the placement and using more than one size stone has made for a better representation of the thick and thin script in the text without a massive increase in the cost of the transfers created by our supplier, nor any increase in application time www.images-magazine.com NOVEMBER 2021 images 75 KB BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT