Guest Post

Is your brand young and hip? Are you on board with office recycling and motion-sensing lights as well as serving vegan food in your canteen?

Many companies are looking at going eco-friendly, it’s good for the planet, and it’s good for business, but when it comes to your custom promotional products, traditionally, they’ve been very throwaway, and this has to change.

Making The Switch

Changing to eco-friendly products is a much better idea. Your customers or clients will prefer it, and you’ll allow your staff to get behind the gifts guilt-free.

Here are five things you should look out for when choosing your next set of freebies.      

Biodegradable

Your first thought for your promotional gift might not be what happens to it when your customer has finished with it, but this is a major concern for people attempting to live a zero-waste lifestyle.

There’s a difference between bin-able and compostable, the latter meaning you can put it in your compost bin, and it will degrade down, whereas the former will just rot when it’s in the trash.

Choose biodegradable products such as paper bags and cardboard notepads, or take it one step further and give your potential clients or customers a plant to grow!

Efficient

In business, time is money, but in eco terms, time is wasted resources.

Promotional gifts don’t have to be gimmicky. Give your customers something they are likely to use that will save them some time, and they will thank you in loyalty.

Choose gifts such as a branded calendar easel or even a branded shower timer for gifts that keep on giving back.

Organic

Organic can seem a bit fancy to some people, especially if you think of it only in food, but the truth is that cotton production drains a huge amount of the earth’s resources and isn’t a very sustainable practice.

Go with organic cotton for your branded facemask, T-shirts, and towels, and why not push it even further by giving away branded organic seeds to encourage your customers to grow with your brand!

Recycled

Plastic has become a bit of a necessary evil these days, and it’s hard to avoid it. When you do need to use plastic in your promotional gifts, why not go for recycled plastic, and make gifts that are useful out of products that have come to the end of their usefulness cycle?

There are all kinds of other promotional products that can use recycled materials too, such as notepads, plastic bags, and even recycled cotton bags for your customers to use when they do their shopping!

Sustainable

Sustainability is big business now, as we realize how many planets’ worth of resources we’d need just to live our everyday lives.

A big bugbear of many promotional gifts is that the business has given no consideration to the sustainability of the product they’re giving away. Sure it’s easy to give away a pen, but how sustainable are the raw materials.

Wow your customers by giving them real, sustainable products, from organic cotton hoodies to bamboo toothbrushes, and keep your brand in their mind for as long as possible.