Your brand may be associated with a sound experience. From our ambient surroundings to a product-produced noise, sound influences our ideas and judgments about the goods and services we buy.

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 It's been a while since I posted, and even longer since I told you my favorite 4imprint promotional product.

 Well, in order to rectify both of these issues, I thought I'd tell you about my new favorite product and why that is.

Last weekend, myself and a few 4imprint collegues, spent the weekend kayaking and camping in Phillips, WI. It's been quite a while since I went kayaking – infact I think this is my first time in the country since I moved here 9 years ago.
In order to protect all our food, drinks, cameras and such stuff, we took along a few Hydro-Pac Dry Bags

In my Kayak, I had one of our #100535 Top Sling Pacs to store most of my items and a smaller #100534 Bag to store my camera. Both dry pacs were clipped to the kayak using the provided clips and the larger bag was stowed in front of my feet, with the smaller camera bag clipped on the top of the kayak.

Well, I'm happy to report that the bags did their job superbly! Nothing had a hint of moisture on it – which is very important when you're carrying a $500 camera mere inches away from a fast flowing river!
They even kept everything dry when one of my collegues (who shall remain nameless!) wiped out going over some rapids and rolled the kayak. The only thing she lost was her water bottle, which wasn't clipped down. The dry pacs remained firmly attached to her kayak and their contents were bone dry.
I have added these pacs to my standard camping equipment and now that the weather here is better, they will be used again extensively.

 If you're interested in these items, starting at $5.85, please see our product pages here

Yesterday in my inbox I received an email that was so striking that it literally made me stop and go 'Wow!' and the best news; it was one of our own!

If you are subscribed to the 4imprint Staff favorites email newsletter then you will also have received it, but if not, then you can see an online copy of it right here.

I personally think that this is one of the most striking images we have used so far in any of our newsletters, Jay and Sarah in our photography studio did a great job here and Heidi seems to be a natural in front of the camera – believe me I've learned the hard way, it isn't as easy as it looks!
Her story shows that sometimes when thinking about promotional products, it's good to think outside the box and yes, I have tested Heidi - she really does carry Sharpies around with her in her bag!

Anyway, this got me thinking about my favorite 4imprint product and how I have a slightly unusual use for it. Everyone knows I'm a technology minded guy, so you would think it has to be USB drives, or wireless mice right….?

…..well, you would be wrong!

My all-time favorite product that we sell here at 4imprint is our messenger bag and here's why:
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a photography nut, frankly I spend way too much money on camera equipment and I always have a camera close by.
I like to combine photography with my love of travel/the outdoors and many weekends I can be found flying or driving off somewhere new with a camera or two.

I don't like using a real camera bag because they're often uncomfortable to carry and attract too much attention, whereas the messenger bag is extremely comfortable on your shoulder (especially when combined with our Grip-it Luggage Identifier which is so popular that we are out of stock of them at the moment, but I'm sure we'll have more soon) and doesn't advertise the fact that you have thousands of dollars of camera equipment in the bag. Best of all, this is a product exclusive to us; you can only buy it here at 4imprint.

I've taken my messenger camera bag all over the world, from the mountains of Northern California, to a recent trip to my native England and it has done a great job. I can fit my large bulky camera, spare batteries, couple of extra lenses, guides books and more in there with plenty of room to spare. There are even two mesh pockets on the outside, perfect for holding water bottles which are essential when playing in the California State Parks.

Don't take my word for it though, this item has received a 5 out of 5 rating from real customers who have purchased the bag. 4 customers have even gone to the trouble of leaving feedback which you can see right here

You can find our exclusive 4imprint Messenger Bag right here and if you'd like to sign up for our Staff Favorites or any of our other emails, then you can do so right here.

Until next time, happy snapping!

The sharper eyed among you may have noticed that something has changed on 4imprint.com

Last Friday we updated the site with a new header and menu system. Okay, so it’s not exactly a revolutionary change but we like it and we hope you do too.

We developed this new look and feel based on customer feedback. We knew that a LOT of you like looking at the ‘sales & closeouts‘, ‘newest items‘ and ‘hot‘ sections of our website, so we made sure you can always get to them by clicking right there in the header.

This is actually just the first of many mini ‘evolutions’ to come – my team is as ever working very hard on many new features for our site, so keep checking back.
We’ll also have some exciting news for our neighbors to the North of the Canadian border very soon!

Got any comments/compliants/compliments about the new header or any other part of the site? Then let us know by using the comments section below!

It’s not every day that you get to check off one of the items in your ‘life’s ambitions’ list, but I have just managed to do exactly that. Item number 5 on the list (okay, I don’t really have an actual list, but I couldn’t resist doing a ‘My Name is Earl‘ impression) is to take a huge road trip out West.
I know that driving to California and back is nowhere near as impressive as Robin and Patties recent hike, but it is still a 5000 mile round trip and by far the furthest I have ever driven.

It started as a bit of a silly idea – some friends invited me to Northern California for Thanksgiving, but the flights were pretty pricey. Well, I could always drive instead I joked..

The more I thought about it, the more I thought ‘why not?’ Okay, it’s not the best time for driving over the Rockies and Sierra Nevada mountains, but I had a ton of vacation time to use up and there was beer waiting to be drunk in California!

Now – most people driving on a trip of this size would probably do it in summer and stay in motels or guest houses at night, but I’m not most people – I’m that quirky guy from England and I wanted the full road trip experience.

So, that’s how I found myself on a 5000 mile round trip at the start of winter using my car for accommodation! Fortunately I have the perfect car for ‘camping’ in – a Honda Element - which is designed for just such an occasion. Just fold the seats down flat into a bed and throw down camping mats and sleeping bags then put up the privacy curtain and it’s just like being in an aluminum tent!

Here’s some of the many things I learned while driving across this great country:

1.       Firstly, this country is HUGE! Really! Well, of course we all know that, but somehow I had never really appreciated it fully until this trip. On the first day I drove for 15 hours straight and travelled over 1,200 miles only to find when I looked on the map that I was only half way on my trip. In the UK where I am from, a 1,200 mile drive will get you all the way across the country AND back again.

2.       When driving on highway 80, you probably won’t see any police cars between Iowa and Utah. This is because they’re all waiting for you in Nevada and if you speed there, you WILL be pulled over. 
Okay, I got my first ever speeding ticket there – and believe me, the fact that I drove a huge distance, only to get a speeding ticket in the middle of the desert amused my collegues back at the office no end!

3.       When jumpstarting a car, the connections go red to red and black to ground, despite what a so called expert may have told you to the contrary. Connecting any other way will probably blow half the fuses on your car.

4.       Sleeping in the car at the highest rest stop on highway 80 in December during a bad snow storm is probably not the most sensible decision you can make. Even with 3 camping mats, a duvet folded over 4 times and a very warm sleeping bag, it’s going to be VERY cold!

5.       Finally, when undertaking a trip of this length in a car during winter weather, you have to be prepared for emergencies. Make sure you have water and food in the car, first aid kit, toolbox, emergency car kit, plenty of windshield washer fluid,  a spare can of gas, foldaway snow shovel, flashlight and more.

Fortunately, 4imprint can help here – we have many of the things that you need for a winter road trip or should probably carry in your car during the colder months anyway.  

I have created a special hidden custom store just for my blog readers which includes some of the many items I carried in my car in case of emergencies as well as a few other choices.
You can view that store here.

The one thing we unfortunately don't sell is snow chains or cables for your tires. Hmm, maybe there's a promotional product in the making – tire cables that leave your logo in the snow when you drive…
If you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a word with our product designers!

 

2 shots of snowy Nevada

   
What your nice clean car looks like after driving through the Sierra Nevada mountains at night in a huge snowstorm!

 
Sleeping at the highest rest stop in the Rocky mountains may be cool but it's also VERY cold!

Happy travelling!

Today’s post is about a SNAPSHOT

What is SNAPSHOT? Well, this is something we developed for our website, based on feedback from you – the customer.

On 4imprint.com right now, pretty much anywhere where we display products, you will see the following icon .
If you mouse over the icon, you should see a lot of information about that item, including all the pricing, ready to ship days and the maximum number of colors that your logo or message can have when imprinted on this item.

The great thing about SNAPSHOT is that you can quickly see the summary information about as many of the products on the page as you like, without having to click through to the product detail pages for each item. This can be a great time saver when you’re trying to decide which items to buy and has been one of our most requested features.

While I’m here, let me just quickly point out what I think is one of our coolest USB flash drives… with a twist – literally.

The Twist USB drive is available in 128mb and 256mb capacities and the great thing is that there is no separate cap to lose (which I always manage to do with my own drives). You simply twist the end and the USB connector retracts into the drive, away from sight – very cool!

Okay, that’s all for today – see you tomorrow with another new feature to explore!

Evening all,

Well, it’s nearly 5am on Tuesday morning and guess what?

I can’t sleeeeeeeep!

You see, I’m recovering from a cold, and it has made my already tragically out of balance sleep patterns go even further out of the window. I hate being sick, I never used to be ill, but I think the constantly changing temperature here in Oshkosh is to blame (for the first time since I moved here over 5 years ago, we can actually see grass on the floor in January – usually it’s knee deep in snow until at least April!)

Anyway, I digress.
In order to spend this time reasonably productively, I have decided to catch up on some of the many tasks that I never seem to be able to find time for when I’m in the office.
One of those tasks – which I have been doing a particularly bad job with – is of course updating my blog.

So, here goes….!

As it is very early in the morning, I thought I would show you some hot stuff….
Now, don’t get TOO excited – this is a family friendly blog after all and I certainly don’t want to end up on the secret ‘naughty persons’ list that our HR director is rumoured to keep (although I suspect I’m probably in there somewhere already!).
I am talking of course about showing you what’s hot at 4imprint!

On the 4imprint homepage, we have a section called ‘what’s hot in our store’ – the clever thing about this section is that it is not us telling you what’s hot, it’s all of you showing each other.
You see, when you visit 4imprint and navigate around looking at products, we record which items get looked at the most. This enables us to show other people which items are popular.

So, if you are ever stuck for ideas, then click the button   and we’ll show you the 50 most viewed items. This list changes every 15 minutes, so it really is fun to see how much the items change throughout the day.
We do the same with keyword searches people make as well, and this can be another great resource if you are unsure about what you want.

While I’m talking about hot promotional products, I thought you might like to know about a recent experience myself and one of my team had.

A few weeks ago, the two of us went to a Microsoft event in Chicago. It was one of those in depth technical conferences that us geeks like to go to occasionally to keep up to date with what’s happening in the world of eCommerce and I certainly won’t bore you with lots of techno babble. What I always find fun at these events though is going in to the vendor hall, to look at what sort of promotional items that real companies are giving away to incent you to go and talk with them about their product or service.

At this event there was the usual t-shirts, pens, computer items etc, but there was one booth where programming geeks like myself were literally lining up 20 deep to claim the freebie.
This particular vendor was giving away flashing light up pendants and people were practically fighting over them.

In the first presentation after lunch, the entire room was full of flashing blue lights from the 3000 or so people who were wearing these things, it was hilarious and probably quite off putting for the poor presenter at the front!

It just goes to show that while there will always be room for pens, t-shirts and mousepads to help promote your brand, sometimes it pays to think a little outside the box to help you promote your message! After all, 3000 programmers can’t be wrong!

Anyway, that’s enough from me for tonight – I really should try and get some sleep now.
Until next time, see ya!

Richard.

Hi everyone,

For those of you who are regular readers to my blog (and I know there a few of you!) have probably noticed that I frequently apologize for not writing as much as I should and make reference to being very busy working on getting the next release of the 4imprint website ready.

Well, after a lot of development, testing, more testing, not much sleep, more testing and did I mention not much sleep… we finally did it – the new and improved 4imprint website was released this morning.

Over the next few days, I’m going to demonstrate some of the new features of the site in detail, but today I thought it would be fun to just go over some of the basics of what’s new on the main homepage.

We know from your feedback that one of the most important things about our site is that you want to be able to find product very quickly. To that end, we have spent quite a bit of time tidying up and expanding areas that were already there such as the ‘featured stores’ and ‘featured products’ as well as introduce many new sections to this page, including:

• Items on sale
  This is by far one of the most popular areas of our site – after all who doesn’t love a bargain?! So we now show 4 of our items on sale and provide a prominent link to the other closeouts and sale items.
• Newest items
  Many of you love to know what’s new at 4imprint and we now show you a selection of the latest items right there on the homepage. Once again there’s a link to the rest of the latest promotional products.
• What’s Hot?
  This is a great section of the homepage to keep coming back to often. What we are doing here is showing you the hottest promotional products, product groups and searches right now.

  How do we know what’s hot? Well, what better way than to let you all tell us!

  The items that appear in the What’s Hot area are the products and pages that have been most viewed by you the customer. This section gets updated every 15 minutes of the day and is a perfect way of seeing what is popular right now.

• RSS Feeds
  If you don’t know what RSS is, then we have a page that explains it here, but briefly it is a way for websites to automatically keep you updated with the latest information without you having to remember to go back to the site all the time.

  I think it’s fair to say that RSS has really taken off over the last year or so. This technology is very popular on news sites such as MSNBC and the good old BBC, as well as information sites.
  So far however, not many shopping sites have embraced it, so we thought it was time to chage all that!

  We have a series of RSS feeds that will notify you the instant that we have new products, new items on sale, new featured products and more.

There are many more new things inside the site such as the much improved order process where we have made it easier and faster for you to get products into your cart and place orders and I will go into more detail over the next few entries in my blog.

So, what do you think of the new homepage? Love it? Hate it?
Be sure to let us know in the feedback section.

Well, it has been quite a while since I made a posting here, sorry about that but my team and I have been working hard on a major upgrade to our site that will be coming soon (more details in a later posting!).

I have been dying to make a blog posting to let you know something cool that happened last week….

…. a spaceship flew about 200 feet over my house!

Now, before you start thinking I have been spending too much time in the sun (and it has been really sunny and warm here in Oshkosh for quite a while now) or go thinking that the crazy Englishman has had one too many late nights locked up in the server room working on the new site, let me explain…

One of the things Oshkosh is famous for is the EAA air show.
Once a year, tens of thousands of aviation fans from all over the US and the world descend on our little town for a week to watch lots of cool aircraft and exciting aerobatic displays. This year over 700,000 people attended the show, including such famous people as Harrision Ford, Calista Flockhart, Richard Gere and Richard Branson.

There’s always one or two stars of the show (a few years ago it was Concorde – apparently they had to build an extension to the runway just so it could land) and this years stars were undoubtedly SpaceShipOne, White Knight as well as the Virgin GlobalFlyer.

Now, I have been accused of being a bit of an aviation nut myself and I knew that I had what was probably a once in a lifetime opportunity to watch SpaceShipOne arrive. So, last Monday I sneaked home early to grab my camera with the intention of sitting on the grass verge at the end of the runway so I could take some photos of the little space ship when it came in to land.

As ever though, things didn’t go quite to plan - it turned out that I didn’t sneak away from work quite early enough, because when I was at home wondering where I had left my camera, I heard what sounded like a huge jet aircraft in the sky. I ran outside, and there was SpaceShipOne attached to the White Knight craft directly above my house!

I live quite close to the airfield and so I was able to watch from my garden as the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination flew a few circles before coming in to land.
Now, as someone who likes aviation I think this is a pretty amazing affair – after all it’s not everyday you see a space ship in the sky from your own Garden (unless you live in Florida I suppose!).

I wasn’t the only one who thought this was an amazing moment – traffic literally stopped in the roads as people got out of their cars to watch this magnificant machine in the sky!

A few days later I got to see SpaceShipOne up close when I attended the airshow. I resisted the urge to stick one of our popular Auto Ribbons onto the spacecraft – besides, there were guards there and they were armed, so I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea!

Oh – one last thought before I go:
Close to where SpaceShipOne was displayed, there was a stand for Virgin Galactic. I picked up a flyer for their future tourist flights aboard what will be SpaceShipTwo. These flights only cost $200,000 – anyone want to sponsor me?!

Richard.

Just a quick post today(!)

In my previous article, I talked about our new functionality that allows our customers to zoom right in on the product image. Well, we have now also launched this this on our Canadian site, so please go and take a look!

The 4imprint zoom site for Canada