My $.02 on using local companies - in my humble opinion - best to use a local company rather than a nationwide one if you have the option. You (SHOULD) get better service, have a local contact, etc. Now - one word of caution - if there is a parent at the school who has such a company/business and wants to be your vendor - I suggest inviting other such local companies to give presentations to your board and bids as well. In the past we had one parent who said "I'll chair this if you give me the business" - the mere appearance of impropriety sent things into a tailspin with the membership. There absolutely positively may be nothing beneath board (no pun intended) but you need to avoid even the appearance. In our case - the parent did see it as an opportunity to charge more being guaranteed the business, and while she put person hours into it as chairing the committee, we didn't get the best deal. Like I said, take my two cents for what they are worth.
Hi,
I'm new to posting, but I thought you might like the input I have. We use a local company to silk-screen our t-shirts. We also found a company on the web who does school mascot stuffed animals (about the size of a beanie baby.) Your mascot is dressed in a shirt and tennis shoes, in your school colors. One carton of 120 mascot animals is $528 = $4.40 per animal. We bought 2 cartons of animals for $499 = $4.16 per animal. We are selling ours for $7.
Check them out if you get a chance... www.k-12mascots.com
We've also used a local company, but they're on the web at pswear.com. They also do a pre-paid school wide program where they make up the flyers for you and send samples. The prices are much better than Lands End so you can make several dollars off each item sold instead of the 3 percent that Lands End does. Our rep was Scott Brown (no relation). Hope this helps.
We use a local company too. One year our former principal had a program on his computer and he did them. How I do not know. He probably just did the shirts and ordered the rest from Duke's. We have also used www.b&sadvertising.com another local co. If you are from the Southern Part of Ohio they may meet with you. But what I would do first is make sure there are no parents that would do this it would cut down on cost and check your local yellow pages.
We have a local company that does embroidery on t-shirts. You don't have to order a minimum number of items. They made up a colored flyer with about 10 items fron t's to hooded jackets that was sent home with an order form. They also made up samples for us to display at registration. Wow, I can't believe the response. Sold over $2,6000 so far and we will do it again before Christmas. Its a prepay and we get a little back off of the sale. We do not do it as a fundraiser. But, its so cool to see so many with the stuff on. It sure beats having to guess what sizes you will sell and having so much inventory to store.
We use a local t-shirt company for ours, and that's the common procedure in our area. If you want some ballpark estimates for pricing, you can check out the Land's End website--they'll put logos on practically everything they do, and we found our local pricing on t-shirts and polo shirts to be comparable (but slightly lower). I once ran into a school website where they did all their spiritwear sales through LE--LE had the logo on file, and people just ordered whatever they wanted directly from them. The school got a small cut of the sales (I think it was 3%), but didn't have to hassle with inventory or distribution.
