As many of you know, we’ve been working with a graphic designer on a new brand identity for Asmbly. What we have now was modestly put together with volunteer efforts and we’ve been eager to rework it with professional help. It is turning out really awesome and we’re super excited to share it with everyone!
To make it fun and celebrate, we’ll be throwing a Brand Rollout Party on Sunday 8/20/23 from 2pm to 5pm . We’ll have the shops reserved for creating and customizing your own Asmbly merch from T-shirts and totes to keychains and tumblers. We’ll also have some snacks and drinks.
Come join the fun and bring a friend! If you don’t want any merch for yourself, we’d still greatly appreciate you coming to hang out and make merch with us in preparation for Texas Woodworking Festival the following weekend
On the topic of merch, we’re working up an order with JDS Industries for this event + merch to have on hand for other/future events. If you aren’t familiar, JDS is a great wholesale supplier that you can get ready to customize products from (the bottle opener coasters we had at the Maker Market last year were from there). They have been really wonderful to work with and quickly resolved order issues we had. Thanks for turning us onto them @JOSEGAYTAN!
If you’re the type of person that’s into looking at large databases of merch options and helping pick the coolest items, I’d love your input on what we order These are some of the potential items I have bookmarked so far:
Rotary Laser double insulated bottles/tumblers (this purple color on the linked items is closest to our new main brand color)
JDS products have been around for a long while. Mainly because they’re innovating, they listen to customers, make improvements on them as necessary and they discard the products that are less than par in quality and practicality. They also give a very good profit margin. The Polar Camel line came around to compete with Yeti. They’re good quality and easy to customize. You do not need a rotary tool if you keep the image to less than 2" to 2 1/2" all their products have the tech specs., dimensions, and how to customize. for the above bottles you can make a jig or buy one from them to make multiples at a time. The skinny tumblers are their newest additions along with some Golf themed dimpled tumblers. The bad thing is that the popular items are hard to get as they have a hard time keeping them in stock. The reason falls under profit margins you can get one of the above bottles for around $11 and resale it for $30 to $50. Again, they are also easy to customize. Heat press mugs chances are that if you have a custom coffee mug more than likely came from them as the quality and price make them hard to beat. Regular mugs (flat side) are easy to do, you have a heat press for that just follow their instructions for temperature, length of time, and how long to wait until removal of the paper. Most time just dunk them in a bucket of water and comes off on its own if is done right. Other odd size mugs such as the beer stein you have to get a rubber sleeve to hold the paper to the mug, has to be torqued to a specific foot per pound, and also requires the use of a convection oven to provide the required 380-to-400-degree temperature. A regular oven does not work as it doesn’t move the het around the mug(s). Again, all this is provided on the tech. specs. information. The customization of mugs is endless such as scan your kid’s “art” work and use Corel or Photo Shop so you can print the paper needed in the heat press. Artwork, funny phrases, logos, Christmas photos, you name it and probably can be done. Anything Leatherette all you need is to find the right speed power setting to get to the layer that has the desired color, Such as Navy blue turns to silver if done right. Brown can be gold or black, and black can be gold or silver. They do sell small sheets to run power speed charts to find the right settings. Well actually they sell them so you can customize or embellish other products but is a cheap way to find the right power speed settings. Multi tools knives and other stuff in that group is just like lasering on wood mainly because is exactly that. the round sublimation (heat press) stuff is just a round or disc that you customize and then attach to the item. the only other stuff is anodized aluminum (key chains, bottle opener) or a painted plate follow the power settings on the spec sheets to laser through to the metal underneath. If you find something you like, chances are they have a video in how to do it or you tube has hundreds of ways, yes, their stuff is that popular. The beer steins (mugs) can be very profitable if you come up with a German Oktoberfest themed graphic and advertise in the right medium a lot of people collect them. Something such as “ASMBLY Fest.” Who knows maybe partner with a local brewery and have an Oktober Fest event if is not being done already. Good day!
We have a full palette of colors this time and the main color is a bit darker than this, but the purple products linked are the ones that are closest. I expressly removed pink from the palette during the brand development process because I personally hate pink and find it visually offensive
Thanks for the tips @JOSEGAYTAN! Great to hear you have direct experience with the Polar Camel products, they really are very reasonably priced. We did indeed use JDS for a few things at the Maker Market last year and will definitely continue with that. We’ve partnered with Austin Eastciders for a few events including last year’s Maker Market and will definitely be continuing to partner with them and other breweries and other businesses around town. We can’t have alcohol at the space without a TABC event license which has a minimum requirement of 2 days for the events, so for now the only events with alcohol at Asmbly will likely be the Maker Market. It will be fun to explore more offsite events with community partners in the future.
Getting back to Valerie’s original question. I looked at the JDS Industries site. When I’m at an event I’m a bit picky about the merch I pick up. I only snag something if it is useful. So here are my thoughts and I’m curious what y’all think and what Items you suggest.
High-level notes
A mix of laser and sublimation items. Sublimation items let us use color and laser items just look cool!
Need a selection of merch that includes inexpensive and higher-end items
Need to keep in mind the time to make. Sublimating a lot of items can be time-consuming, whereas Dorian or Tarkin can blast through keychains and business cards quickly.
Drinkware:
I’m partial to large tumblers and water bottles (32 to 40 oz)that fit in my car’s drink holder and the bottle holder on my backpack… LTM7359
Burning things with laserbeams never gets old, but for SWAG/trinkets /tchotchke/merch/giveways being able to do full color is important. So I suggest we have some blank sublimation water bottles. We need to ensure they fit in our new coffee mug heat press. Something like: SWB931
Small Stuff
Probably need small inexpensive things to have on hand like keychains
I’m assuming we would make these ourselves. Having a mix of wood and acrylic would be interesting. Clear acrylic is nice, but I’ve seen fluorescent acrylic that really pops with you etch it (For Valerie’s benefit we can avoid Barbie Doll pink). Having a design on hand that say’s ASMBLY and space to personalize it gives us options when we want to demo the laser during a tour.
The USB drives are nice and we could preload them with ASMBLY information PDFs. However, on a security note, you should never use a strange USB driver. You never know what might be loaded on it.
Bottle openers
I like these because they are practical. A mix of laserable leather and sublimation would be nice. JDS even has a sublimatable wood bottle opener ( SBL480) that would be in theme for ASMBLY and the Woodworking Fest
Socks
OK, I admit this one is a bit dubious, but the novelty of having ASMBLY branded socks ( SCK202) just makes me laugh. At the very least, we should get a few pairs to use as examples in the sublimation classes!!
I could totally see socks with all the different area icons scattered on them. Or maybe if we could find sublimation blank bow ties…
Could we get the logo into a format ingestible by the embroidery machine? Some low-key “a” logo polos might look sharp. Or a “bring your own thing” to embroider.
Speaking of practical, something like clipboards or notepad folders might see a lot of use. Perhaps business card cases, especially if we can get ones that fit our new cards.
Thanks for finding some great options @michleon100 ! I like these and good idea on the sublimatable water bottles. OK I’ve totally got a sock design in mind now that you’ve said that @Jon . Adding socks to the list!
Good idea on embroidery. Someone in the space figured out how to do that with the machine we have right? I might be misremembering but I want to say someone said @summermiller125 figured this out.
I was thinking about business card holders last night too and came across this design — Cordova M - Square Business Card Holder - Wenge https://a.co/d/2XLEIOU
Just the first interesting, easy to make thing I’ve found so far.
We need some Hats! 1 or 2 different styles of Asmbly hat would sell pretty well I imagine. I would have bought one by now if we had some decent options.
At minimum, we could at least have some embroidered patches that people could sew to hat blanks.
Oooo good idea on hats! I remember some talk of some sort of hat press in Textiles at one point. That ring any bells for anyone? @stepho@Sarah@tomthm@Allzman
Also, note to all – I completely forgot that on rare occasions I actually have a personal life and didn’t check my calendar when we scheduled this party We’re moving it up by a few hours so it doesn’t conflict with a show I have tickets for that night.
Hey everyone! Party update to give some more details on what we’ll have going on and a link to the swag spreadsheet you can check out to make your claim on items you know you’ll want to make and keep for yourself.
The Party
Sunday 8/20, 2p-5p
We will have some snacky things and desserts as well as sodas, waters, etc and start things off with a short presentation introducing the new brand. We’ll show you the various elements including the new logo which includes sub-branding logos for each shop area. We’ll also show some of the new marketing materials we have including a complete overhaul of our social media with lots of branded templates ready to go for quick content creation. We’ll leave a reel going showing this content after the presentation, so it’ll be readily available for view throughout the party.
Make Your Own Merch
For the rest of the party, we’ll be hanging out socializing while making merch. We’ll have stations setup with designs ready to go and options for easily customizing your stuff if desired.
If you know you’re going to want some custom Asmbly merch of your own, please take a look at this spreadsheet here to see what we have (“Owned” tab) as well as what we are looking at purchasing (“Prospective” tab). If you see something you want to claim (on “Owned” tab) or request that we order (on “Prospective” tab), please leave a comment on the spreadsheet, or here on Discourse, or message me directly however you like.
I am aiming to place the Transfer Express order by tomorrow night (Sun 8/13), so I will need input for the Prospective tab ASAP. Transfer Express is the order that will have a lot of different shirt style options as well as hats, shop apron, and bags (I even found this laptop bag that is < $16 and looks pretty decent). If you’re interested in checking out the other products they offer and getting something else, feel free to do so and let me know what you want! The main color for the new brand is a deep indigo that’s a bit tricky to color match, so we’ve been going with navy or deep purple depending on what they look like. Canvas, grey, and white are also OK, but not black.
Stations
Rotary Laser
Engraving water bottles, tumblers, and other round objects
Keychains, bottle openers, USBs, new shop area signs
Painting
We’ll have some areas set up for painting new shop area signs and would love some help with that. Shout out to @michleon100 for helping find paints to match the new colors
Origami
We’ve got a marketing piece that involves origami, so if you’re into that and want to hang out chatting while folding paper we’ve got you covered.
Merch Price?
Unless you’ve made a special request for an item to be ordered that’s >$10, this is all FREE with suggest donation being the cost of materials (note suggested, not required). We’re excited to share the new brand with everyone and hope you will be too!
. We’ll have the shops reserved for creating and customizing your own Asmbly merch from T-shirts and totes to keychains and tumblers. We’ll also have some snacks and drinks.
These are some of the potential items I have bookmarked so far:
We’re moving it up by a few hours so it doesn’t conflict with a show I have tickets for that night.