Design Tips for Effective Branded Merchandise

Creating branded merchandise that truly resonates with your target audience and enhances your brand identity is both an art and a science. In today’s cluttered market, it’s crucial that your promotional products stand out while staying true to your brand's core values. Here are essential design tips to ensure your branded merchandise makes a lasting impression.

Consistency is Key

Your merchandise should be a direct reflection of your brand. It’s your opportunity as a company to express your brand tone and personality in a fun and unique way that few other marketing channels can. While it is easy to get overwhelmed with the limitless choices of both products and decoration methods, it is very important to stay consistent throughout all the campaigns you run. This includes your brand's colors, fonts, and logos consistently across all items. If your brand is formal and professional, your merchandise should also convey these traits. 

While it is possible to do a campaign that leans a little further out of the typical design aesthetic of your brand, it is important to tie it back in to ensure your message stays consistent. Whether it’s serious, fun, or quirky, make sure the items communicate this personality clearly.

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Choose the Right Product

Similar to shopping for yourself influenced by your personal style, it’s important to select products that appeal to your target audience while staying relevant to your brand. If you offer premium services, we would recommend you choose premium merchandise to reflect your emphasis on quality and value over price. 

Other factors to consider when choosing products are relevance to the industry you serve and general functionality of the product. For example, if your company is in the fitness space, branded workout bands, sweat towels, and gym bags would be a perfect fit for your audience. While some products are universally useful such as pens, notepads, and water bottles, it can help you stand out to choose products that are unique to your specific audience. 

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Logo Placement

The placement and size of your logo can dramatically affect the overall look and feel of a product. The era of LARGE logos has luckily ended. Gone are the days when companies would loudly plaster their logo on every product they offered their employees and customers. The 2024 design trends emphasize a retail looking design aesthetic with subtle logos that do not overpower the product itself. In some cases, companies are going full incognito mode and only including logos on the fabric tag inside a shirt or tote. 

The intention behind branding choices like this is to prioritize the use of the item instead of using the product as a billboard. While that doesn’t seem like the most strategic marketing tactic, you’d be surprised how impactful products with subtle branding can be. While it’s not as public facing - the product user will associate fond memories with your product and you will find your customers developing a loyalty and strong brand awareness for your company in a more subconscious way. Sounds devious, but really it's just great marketing. 

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Color Matters

Color can make all the difference when designing branded merchandise. While many companies opt for shades that complement and are consistent with your existing brand, a popular trend right now is to include subtle nods to their brand colors with one color logos on neutral colored products in tones such as taupe, white, black, and beige. There is no right or wrong answer, but it’s something to consider when designing your product. 

A common misconception is that all products have to align with the company colors in order to stay within brand guidelines, when that isn’t necessarily the case. Examples such as events or limited time campaigns are a perfect opportunity to choose merch that may not fall into your typical brand style. It gives your team the opportunity to do something a little different without disrupting your brand consistency. 

Typography

Choosing a font for your branded merchandise sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how much it can impact the look of your products. When deciding on a font, it’s important to avoid overly decorative fonts, especially for smaller merch. Before approving designs, we recommend having a few pairs of eyes look at the design to judge the legibility of the final proof. Products like pens are a great example of when legibility is highly affected by the front choice. 

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Keep It Simple

The beauty of branded merchandise is the infinite options to choose from for product color, font, placement, style, decoration method, etc. What makes the job of merch designer fun though, can also be the most frustrating part. With so many options to choose from, it can be hard to make a decision. When working with clients, we typically recommend customers keep their design as simple as possible. 

A clean and straightforward design often has a more substantial impact than a cluttered one. It allows you to focus on delivering your brand message clearly and concisely. The example above shows a simple logo design with tonal differences that are subtle and create an elegant and clean look. 

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Material Considerations

Even the coolest designs will be impacted by the material and decoration methods you choose when finalizing your design. When working with fabrics like the faux fur featured above, the best way to highlight your brand is to use either a fabric or leather patch that will give you a flat surface to decorate on. It’s a functional addition the adds to the perceived value of the product.

If you’re working on an intricate design with fine lines, a method like embroidery may not be the best choice. The limits of embroidery size will make it nearly impossible to execute certain designs and even when executed, will not be as clear as other decoration methods. For intricate designs on fabric, screen printing is a safer way to go. 

Our Lahlouh branded merchandise experts will assist you in choosing the most effective decoration methods based on the files you provide. Our design team can assist you with creating files in the correct format for each decoration method and ensure your files are high resolution. 

Mock-ups and Prototypes

Mockups and prototypes are essential when working on branded merchandise design. Lahlouh will not proceed to production until you have seen and approved the proofs of how your design will look on the actual product. In some cases, we even recommend a pre-production sample that will show you how the execution will look in that specific decoration method. 

We recommend doing pre-production samples because it’s the best way to ensure that you are happy with the end-product. 

Now that we’ve given you insights from our 25+ years of experience in branded merchandise, let’s see what we can create together! Send us a note and we can put together a presentation with the perfect products for your brand. 

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