Archive for January, 2008
The annual Printwear and Promotion Awards are designed to recognise outstanding garment industry achievements in the following areas:
- Technical Innovation Award
- Customer Service Award
- Environmental/Energy Saving Award
- Promotional Product of the Year
- Garment Decorator of the Year
- Manufacturer of the Year
- Distributor of the Year
The Quayside Group was established in 1995 and since then the business has become a leading supplier of wholesale clothing. All the business’s operations run on e-commerce-enabled express clothing platforms. The Quayside Group is proud to announce that it is a finalist in two categories in the Printwear & Promotion Awards.
CUSTOMER SERVICE AWARD
(sponsored by: Screen Process & Digital Imaging magazine)
The judges noted that www.polo-shirts.co.uk uses its online Satisfaction Monitoring System (SMS) to understand its customer’s views on the service and the products it supplies. Customers are sent a post delivery online questionnaire to complete and upon its return, SMS gives www.polo-shirts.co.uk a unique understanding of its customers’ feelings. It provides the company with vital information and helps ensure Quayside is constantly offering an unbeatable product range and service.
DISTRIBUTOR OF THE YEAR
The Judges noted that Quayside Clothing has used the power of the internet to offer total convenience, easy ordering and outstanding customer service through its web platforms, which distribute products from JHK, Fruit of the Loom, Stedman, Fanshirt, SAF Organic Clothing, and print materials from Grafityp. Its web ordering systems www.tradetag.co.uk and www.polo-shirts.co.uk both use sophisticated search technology to ensure customers are able to find and order the products they need - fast.
The Awards will be announced on Monday 3rd March at the NEC Birmingham.
January 31st, 2008
This is the only dedicated trade show for the UK’s garment decoration industry. Attendance means visitors can view the world’s leading brands available through UK-based distributors, manufacturers and distributors of embroidery machines and accessories, screen printing and digital printing technology and many other techniques for garment decoration. Held between March 2 – 4, Printwear & Promotion 2008 will reveal the very latest garments and promotional products. Exhibits include workwear, schoolwear sportswear, leisurewear promotional clothing and other promotional merchandise along with new machinery, supplies and techniques in embroidery, transfer, sublimation and screen printing and there will be a comprehensive programme of fashion shows and industry seminars each day.
This year also see the launch of the all-new Printwear & Promotion Awards, a comprehensive awards programme for the decorated garment and promotional products industry. Bringing together the entire industry in a celebration of the companies, innovations and people that are achieving the highest professional standards and helping to drive this dynamic and rapidly expanding business sector forward, the Awards will be held on Monday 3rd March, the middle night of the event. Visitor Registration is now open at www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk for the premiere event of the year. The NEC, Birmingham, is conveniently located for easy access by road, rail or air.
NEC by ewen and donabel
January 28th, 2008
Well, Jeremy Paxman certainly put the cat among the pigeons, or the support under the microscope recently! He contacted Marks & Spencer chief executive Stuart Rose, a man already reeling from the bad Christmas sale figures in his stores, to lambast him about M&S underwear.
‘Like very large numbers of men in this country I have always bought my socks and pants at Marks & Sparks,’ Paxman wrote in an email to Rose, later published in The Times. ‘I have noticed that something very troubling has happened. There’s no other way to put this. Their pants no longer provide adequate support. When I’ve discussed this with friends and acquaintances it has revealed widespread gusset anxiety.’
Most men over twenty-five, asked where they buy their underwear, will undoubtedly say Marks and Sparks – the company’s boxers, Y-fronts, slips, long johns and so on are everywhere. One in four men wears their undies and they are the largest lingerie and underwear retailer in the UK by a long shot – outselling their nearest competitor by four times. So the country anxiously awaits the result of the ‘pants-bearing meeting’ planned for the two men – or should that be pants-baring?
Keep your pants on by jo-h
January 24th, 2008
What’s the biggest trend in menswear? Forget Dolce & Gabbana’s new tartan biker jackets (yes, seriously) or the velvet great-coat that Armani sent down the catwalk, what guys are going to buy is high-technology outerwear, that has taken technology from NASA and MIT and fed it straight into jackets.
There’s the Zegna Sport’s solar jacket, the world’s first coat to recharge a cellphone, iPod or BlackBerry! It does this by harnessing the sun’s energy, using solar cells which are mounted on a neoprene collar and convert solar light into sustainable energy. Textile wires carry the converted energy to a rechargeable battery or directly to your iPod or cellular phone and only four hours of sunlight is required to fully charge the battery. Nautica has a similar idea for its Stadium jacket, but in this case it’s a lithium battery that is hidden in an inner pocket. The battery feeds carbon-fibre heating technology in the front and back of the fleece vest and a tiny control panel lets the wearer increase or decrease the heat in either panel, so if you’ve got your back to the wind while watching the footie, you can have a toasty-warm spine. The rechargeable battery conserves up to 500 charges that each last between two to six hours - depending on the outside temperature. ‘The technological fashion trend is going to be huge,’ predicts one menswear buyer. ‘It’s the clothing equivalent of owning a 40-inch plasma television.’
iPod by zengame
January 21st, 2008
This year they are going to be wearing Roberto Cavalli - or at least, since all five Spice Girls were sitting in the front of his autumn/winter menswear show in Milan - presumably that’s what they are buying for their chaps.
Since David Beckham left England we haven’t seen so much of him and Victoria was didn’t have him in tow for the Cavalli show, but that could be for another reason – his latest modelling role: poster-boy for Emporio Armani underwear. “If I looked like that I’d walk down the street in my panties, too,” she mused. Hmm… really? Well sometimes, as in the recent tour photos, it does rather look as if her undies were on show anyway.
Good news for guys who don’t like to shop! The big colour on the autumn catwalks seems to be gunmetal (dark grey to you and me) and that means that you don’t have to be dragged out to buy the latest daffodil yellow or ‘eau de nil’ coloured garment by a fashion-conscious partner. If you are keen on getting it just right, that gunmetal does have a metallic edge to it, and is being teamed with a deep brown red, variously called ox-blood and burnt earth.
Spice girls on tour by tkkate
January 17th, 2008
After a gloomy Christmas, high street retailers are pessimistic. Debt-laden customers face the reality that years of carefree spending, fuelled by record levels of cheap credit, may be coming to an end. But in a typically British fashion, rather than going for the burn of not shopping, we’ve been exploring how resourcefully we can continue to get the shopping buzz without the hefty bill, and while high street shops took a hit over Christmas and the New year, two sectors made big gains: the charity sector enjoyed sales growth of 5% in the run-up to Christmas and home shopping took off in a big way.
This year 4.4 million people turned their backs on the festivities on Christmas Day itself, preferring to shop online for TVs, mobile phones and washing machines, with virtual tills ringing up £84m - a staggering 270% increase on 2006. Men, right across the world, fuelled a large part of the post-Christmas sales online too, both shopping for electrical goods and, interestingly, buying new clothes – were they fed up with being taunted about their lack of sex appeal over Christmas, I wonder? It seems that men use down-time, Bank Holiday weekends, Public Holidays etc to hoover up clothing bargains and one reason for this may be that they can sit down with their wife or girlfriend, and a laptop, and buy online with expert advice alongside them, but without the hassle of wandering the high street with shopping bags, or the humiliation of being seen by their mates out shopping.
Internet shopping by Pandemia
