Earlier this week I had the pleasure of travelling to Munich, Germany, and attending the Beyond Tellerrand Conference.
I’ve attended a couple of the Beyond Tellerrand Conferences in Dusseldorf in the past and it is hands down my favourite conference. The very first time I attended the conference there was a feeling of returning back home to comfortable surroundings and conversations with good friends, a feeling which is quite unique when it comes to attending conferences.
Marc, the sole organiser, does a wonderful job of making everyone feel welcome and at home, and his easy going approach to things seems to rub off on all of the attendee’s as well making it the easiest place to make new friends.
This year I had the additional pleasure of working with Marc to design and print a Conference notebook that would given out as part of the swag bag for all of the attendee’s.
Initially, I sent Marc a few mockup ideas for the pocket notebooks that we could print onto either the Plain Kraft or Accent Antique you find on our existing products. These mock ideas were based on some of the previous artwork that had been produced for the conference.
At this point I was also looking at a new product that had been produced by GF Smith, Extract paper.
Extract paper is a beautiful stock that is produced by recycling some of the 7 million disposable coffee cups used in UK every day (the ones you find in Costa, Nero’s, Starbucks). The paper comes in 180 and 380gsm weight and a range of different colours.
The manufacturing costs of this paper stock is higher because of the process that it needs to go through.
- Collecting all the discarded coffee cups from a variety of UK stores/locations
- Stripping the plastic marketing material from the outside of the cup, this is then put onto a container ship bound for China where the plastic is turned into electic wire insulation ( the container ship would otherwise be making the trip to China with no cargo)
- Coverting the plactic-less cups back into pulp and then producing the paper.
While it was more expensive than the other options… it feels incredible and is great for the environment.
I had also recently come across an example of black foiling printed on black paper and thought that it would be an interesting subtle — yet gorgeous — way to produce these conference notebooks.
While more expensive, in my heart I knew that it was going to deliver the best results.
Before I was going to lock in more expensive option I wanted to see what else we could do if we had to stick to a budget.
As a lower cost alternative we looked at the option of going with the Kraft paper covers, the same as our Plain Kraft Notebooks, and we made a couple of mockups on how that might look with the plain Beyond Tellerrand logo on the front.
When reviewing these versions of the conference notebooks, Marc asked if we could make it feel more homely, a little more raw and handmade. We added a bit of texture to the Beyond Tellerrand logo and washed out the blacks a little more to give it a worn look
The desire for Marc to make it feel a little more handmade or personalised drew me back again to think of ways to bring in the black extract covers and the foiling, but in a way that could save some budget.
One of the ways in which you can make an expensive print run more affordable is to simply print more. There is a certain amount of paper, ink, and effort that goes into setting up a lithograph print job. The first 50 or so sheets that go through the printing press are discarded while the printers work towards getting the best possible print. That’s 50 sheets if you’re going to print 500 notebooks, or 50 sheets if you’re going to print 1500 notebooks.
I wasn’t able to magically increase the number of attendee’s to the Munich BT conference to 1500, but what I could do is design a notebook that could be personalised for each conference, but still be printed in a single cost saving run.
We ended up designing the conference notebooks so that they could be used across all three Beyond Tellerrand conferences allowing the per cost of the the notebook to come down while still allowing for the personalised touch for Munich, Dusseldorf, and Berlin.
This allowed me to tick the Munich option for each of the 500 conference notebooks and one or more of the “I attended, talked or helped out” options.
There are occasions when you want to approach conference swag with he idea to cut a few corners to save on costs and maximise profits when it comes to ticket sales or sponsorship offers, but in this case it was all about delivering something of amazing quality that wouldn’t simply be discarded on a table or in the bin when you unpacked your bag after getting home from the conference.
The response from Marc and the speakers was fantastic with everyone loving their customised sets. The attendees’ I spoke with were impressed, but more importantly there were no notebooks discarded and the extra copies were quick to be snapped up.
Take a look at the final result:
IIf you like what you see and have an idea that you would like us to help you with please get in touch.
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