As the number of items being offered in the promo items industry continues to increase so does the confusion among consumers. The number of almost identical offerings seems to increase weekly leaving buyers to wonder what are the real differences between similar promo items?
Differences among brands can be significant particularly when it comes to product durability. Among the questions to ask your supplier is whether or not they have personally seen and handled the product they are offering? Many times what appear to be identical products are generic knockoffs of lesser quality. This is often the case with electronics such as flashlights and also in drinkware. Watch for tumblers with cheap plastic interiors but flashy metal exteriors. Many of these are not dishwasher safe and what ends up happening is your customer will wash the item once, ruin it and hold a grudge. There is nothing wrong with a plastic tumbler if it fits the purpose of your event but most end users will expect that a metal exterior tumbler is dishwasher safe when in reality they are not.
When buying promotional apparel pay particular attention to the quality of embroidery and screen printing. If you are buying a dark shirt and are looking to have it imprinted is your supplier going to run a white base layer to give your logo the pop it deserves or are they going to cut costs and print the logo with no underlayment? With embroidery are they going to use top of the line threads or generic knockoffs? You should be able to ask your supplier what brand thread they are using and you should be able to ask for the actual thread color from the manufacturer. Keep this information so you have it for future orders. There is no sense buying high quality promotional apparel if your logo is embroidered poorly. A common practice is to lighten the thread count to save money or run the embroidery machines so quickly that the end result is a subpar decoration.
As far as the apparel itself aside of making sure you are buying first quality products the differences will often end up being consumer preference. Most suppliers offer the same name brands with the only difference being price which can sometimes be significant. When buying online check to see whether the embroidery disk or screen is included in the price of if that is optional as a four color screen can run an additional $100 and many charge $50-$125 for embroidery tapes. These charges can be budget busters if they aren"t known prior to ordering as they are most often billed after the order ships.
It has always been our policy to let the expert manufacturers decorate their products. They have the knowledge, the equipment and the experience to do the job properly. This comes at a price though and some suppliers will have items decorated by a local printer to save money. Ask your supplier upfront whether they will be doing the decorating or will it be done by a third party. Often if the decorating is done by a third party there are disclaimers that state a certain percentage of goods may be "damaged" resulting in short shipping or a customer being billed for more items than they received. If the factory does the decorating you get billed only for what was shipped.
The differences in product quality and particularly decoration quality can be significant. By asking some of the questions above you can help to insure your products arrive as expected.