It has been a while since I have written here to tell the world the latest Indigo news. Kate, our fantastic fashion blogger has been keeping you all amused with t-shirt tales whilst Jo has been leading the team in the office through the economic doldrums that have been battering the economy. I have been in Paris since January, on a sabbatical, studying for an MBA at HEC.
Considering the bad news that has been plastered across every visible surface of the media, Indigo is in good shape. Like everyone, we’ve carried out a full survey of our costs, trimming where savings could be made. Our sales have been excellent to date, with orders from new customers making up for those customers who feel they can go without promotional clothing this year. In fact Jo’s client services team is so busy at the moment that we are hiring for a new team member ASAP – check out the jobs page.
Stephan’s enthusiasm for digital printing has lead him to set up a direct-to-garment printing operation in the northern end of the office, and to complement it, a new Roland vinyl plotter cutter. Digital printing is great for orders that are too small for screen printing or for sampling and he has written a fantastic guide to digital printing along with prices.
I will be speaking about our forays into digital printing and the Indigo story at the upcoming FESPA digital conference in Amsterdam on May 13th May at 11.45am. I went to FESPA’s conference in Berlin in 2007 and can highly commend it as one of the best European trade shows for the industry so if you are in the trade do come along and check out the latest industry innovations.
We continue to support ethical garment manufactures and are delighted with the new products from Continental for 2009. Their catalogue is available for download as a PDF and Eleni is adding new product details as quickly as she can to the promotional clothing catalogue. Make sure you check out the carbon neutral range, certified by the Carbon Trust called Earth Positive. The office was also delighted to recive a certificate from Paper Round, our office recycling partner, announcing we recycled 242kgs of paper and 24kgs of cans and plastic bottles!
Award for office recycling
T-shirt printing still makes up the core of our daily operations whilst we continue to screen print, embroider, label, bag and distribute a myriad of apparel to our clients. The WordPress merchandise store, run by Indigo, has a raft of new products coming onstream in 2009 too.
Indigo’s student cashback scheme has proved to be popular with the Royal College of Music, Southampton and York to name but a few universities who have benefited from cheques to date. We have increased our marketing in Cambridge, our original office location and will be sponsoring the student unions (CUSU’s) steward’s clothing this year as well as having a stand at the ever popular Fresher’s fair.
I post infrequently to Indigo’s twitter account and I’ll strive to fill the Indigo blog with more Indigo news. If there are any t-shirt bloggers out there who would like to become guest authors, maybe you have a product, site or brand to promote then feel free to get in touch.
Hope everyone enjoys the start of the summer!