Branded workwear looks good and feels good to wear. In this blog we look at the benefits of personalising your workwear and answer the question: what garments can be branded – and which ones can’t?
Why invest in personalised workwear?
There are many benefits to investing in personalised workwear. These include:
- Enhanced brand image – Branded workwear makes your staff look smart and professional, which improves public perception of your brand. First impressions count, and the fact your business has taken care to provide its employees with a high quality, professionally-branded uniform suggests that it applies the same quality and professionalism to its products and services.
- Improved brand awareness – When your staff wear branded workwear, they’re advertising your brand wherever they go, without thinking about it. A good quality and comfortable branded jacket, for instance, may be worn both inside and outside of the workplace, including on the commute, at client meetings, and in your employees’ leisure time, increasing exposure to your brand.
- Better staff engagement – Good quality branded workwear takes the pressure off employees who might otherwise struggle to put together a smart and suitable work outfit each day. Ensuring your staff look smart and feel comfortable helps to foster a sense of pride and unity among your teams, cultivating a positive working environment.
- Clear identification – Clothing your employees in branded workwear can help customers identify them and makes them seem more approachable. It could also be a health and safety advantage in the event of an incident, as you can quickly see at a glance where your staff are, even in a crowd.
Which items of workwear can be personalised?
We are often approached by customers wanting to know if different types of garments made from various materials can be branded with their logo or other identifiers of their company brand.
We tell them that yes, of course, we can brand anything you like, in any way you want – the sky is the limit!
From standard workwear polo shirts, work trousers and softshell jackets, to heavy-duty outerwear and hi vis clothing, you can apply corporate logos and branding to any garment – it’s just how you do it that might have to change depending on the material the garment is made from.
For many types of garments, you can choose between embroidery and print as a method for applying your branding. Each method has its benefits and drawbacks. Find out more about print vs embroidery in workwear branding.
In general, embroidery is more expensive, but it can also last longer and look better. However, the cost of embroidering a large area of branding across an entire roll-out of your company’s workwear may be prohibitive.
There are also other areas for consideration when choosing between print and embroidery.
For example, you wouldn’t want to embroider a logo onto a jacket that is supposed to be waterproof, as the resulting holes that would make in the fabric would let in the rain and ruin the usefulness of the jacket.
However, you could use a printed transfer to apply a logo or other branding to an outdoor jacket without causing any loss of function.
On the other hand, embroidery is the branding method of choice for personalising stretchy fabrics such as those made from wicking materials. This is because a printed transfer would be liable to distort or crack under stretching.
Likewise, fleece materials are too thick to be printed and should instead have logos and branding applied with embroidery.
What type of personalisation should I go for?
While placing the company logo on the chest or breast of a polo shirt or jacket remains the most commonly chosen way to brand corporate workwear, this isn’t the only way in which companies can represent their brand through their uniform.
Bespoke colours, tag lines and imagery can all be valuable ways to communicate your brand through your corporate clothing. Branding doesn’t necessarily have to be small either; many brands have successfully rolled out polo shirts and jackets with full-sized branding to the back.
One client recently asked us to add the names of their key customer brands to the arm of their workwear, in order to increase the kudos of their own brand by association.
There is also a growing trend to add monogrammed names of individual staff members and/or their department underneath a logo, to aid with identification.
To find out more about branded workwear and the personalisation service we offer at iSB Group, why not give us a call?
Whilst we offer bespoke branded workwear, you can also review our range of stock items here too.
