It has been my colleagues jobs to look through the order history for our bureau personlisation jobs recently (this is where we print the base artwork onto a full colour solid plastic cards and hold them in stock for customer to call off when new members join).

It is amazing that we have quite a number of customers who have plastic cards in stock yet have not called them off from there stock for over 12 months,

We have decided to politely enquiry as to whether they still need them as unfortunately our storage space is not endless.

If the cards are no longer require we will securely destroy them.

Alternatively if they are still require we will hold them for a further 6 months. If they are not required within this time we will contact the customer again and ask if they requirement them destroying or posting to them.

I do not envy my colleague having this job as it is quite time consuming!

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Hello All,

I hope you have all had time to recuperate over the Easter weekend and are ready to order your plastic cards.

A lot of customers have realized that there membership / loyalty schemes are really taking off and more cards are required urgently.

If you have ordered membership or loyalty cards with us earlier this year it may be time to double check your stock and re-order more plastic cards if required. Why leave it to the last minute and potential upset new members or customer as you do not have cards available for them.

On a final point, we all have the May bank holidays to look forward to  :-)

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Recently one of our long term repeat customers found ‘cheaper’ plastic cards from one of our competitors and because of the lower prices they had to order plastic cards from them so they could pass the saving onto their client.

However, today this customer returned to us and said the following:

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Today we have been very busy with rush orders and we anticipate we will also receive a lot of rush plastic card orders this week. However, because of the Easter bank holiday weekend we are losing 2 working days (Friday and Monday) so this does not help us or the customers with a fast turnaround for those orders that are needed ‘yesterday’

However, as usual, if you have a rush order, email your artwork and details to us and we will see how we can help you.

To assist with the hassle that the Easter bank holiday causes, we are advising customers whose orders are being dispatched on Thursday to be delivered on Saturday AM, unfortunately, this does cost extra but will help to ensure that the customers plastic card order is delivered on Saturday AM rather than on Tuesday the following week.

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We always offer postal proofs with every full colour solid plastic cards order. There are numerous reasons why we offer them. Basically the cards when printed and finalized may come out differently than expected. Reasons include:

-  Orders with magnetic strips need to be tested to ensure they work ok before the full order is printed. Occasionally the proofing stage can highlight problems before the full order is printed.
-  The above also applies for barcodes.
-  Colours can come out differently then expected when the artwork is printed on to plastic cards.
-  A printed proof may highlight any areas of the artwork which have been provided by the customer as proof quality/low resolution. The customer can then decide if they have the ability to provide the artwork in a better quality.
-  Optional extras such as embossing can be applied to show the final result, sometimes embossing may cover key text which the customer has not realised previously.

The above are example but highlight the obvious reasons for producing postal proofs.

Most plastic cards companies, often those shipping the cards into the UK from the far East, do not offer postal proof I think this is basically because it would take far to long to ship a sample card with the customer artwork on to the UK. Please bear this in mind when ordering cards from a company who does not produce the cards in the UK. Imagine if your full order arrived and it looked terrible or the magnetic strips did not work, I doubt anything could be done.

However, it may not be obvious that some companies are not producing the cards in the UK, i.e. their sales office may be here in the UK, so you need to ask them if the cards are produced here in the UK or if they are shipped in from the far east etc.
Place your order with us and receive your postal proof before we print your full order. This is to ensure full review and testing of any optional extras can occur before you commit to your full order being printed.

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I just wanted to write a very quick blog surrounding split order for full colour solid plastic cards.

By split orders, I mean where a customer wants to order, for example, the quantity of 2000 cards but this consists of 2 separate cards.

We can sometimes offer discounts for these orders as long as the print ready artwork is submitted at the same time and the orders for the the two cards are the same (e.g. same product, delivery address, payment detail etc). Quite often this works out an economical way to order business cards for a number of staff members.

Please contact us for more details. We would just need to know how many cards in total you require along with the quantity of each and any optional extras such as barcodes, signature panels, numbering what you require.

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We often have customers requesting email proof after email proof with very slight changes to their artwork. The email proofs we provide are basically just the customers own artwork sent back to them.

We provide email proofs to ensure that the artwork has not become corrupt and that we have the correct files for them (e.g. we have not by accident selected the wrong one from our printing files). Customer seem to use them to proof read there own artwork! This really is not the point of them and basically causes unnecessary work for both the customer and for us.

We obviously want customer to be as happy as possible hence providing email proofs to ensure the artwork is correct. However we do really need to receive only the finished final, print ready, signed off artwork. Its such a shame that some customer consume so much of our time meaning that we can not help more customers in a quicker space of time.

We had a customer today who requested a 3rd email proof to show round a meeting they are having on Friday and they can not even confirm there embossing requirements which may mean a 4th submission of artwork.  We are wondering why they can not show their own artwork around the meeting? Surely this wold be easier for all concerned!?

Any comments would be welcome. We do not want to upset customers but we simply do not have enough time in the day.

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Well its the end of the financial year again and we are busy ensuring all invoices etc have been entered into the accounts. We would prefer to be assisting customer with there plastic cards orders however unfortunately government regulations and forms beckon.

Hopefully the year end will not disrupt our working practices too much and we will be up running at full steam shortly.

Lets hope that in the new financial year the economy picks up for all our customers, we wish you all the best of luck (good management goes a long way!)

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We have been producing passes for a show for a number of years now, they are a great customer to work with. Anyway, they have recently placed there annual order for plastic cards. The design changed a lot of some of the cards this year and in our opinion they look very professional yet modern. We produced the postal proofs as we do with all new designs and they confirmed that the cards looked great. They are gold passes after all, so really do need to look the part.

We receive a lovely email from the customer in question today which said  ”Just to say thank you for the passes that I received this morning”.

We would just like to say that you are more than welcome, we hope your event goes well and to speak with you next year.

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When customers send us their artwork for plastic cards, unlike other plastic card printing companies, we check the artwork to ensure it is to the correct specification and that it will print ok.

If the customers artwork isn’t to the correct specification we either tell the customer this and ask them to send it to the correct specification or if we are able to fix the artwork, we do so free of charge, but we also advise the customer of this – just so they know.

Obviously, it takes time and resources for us to fix customers artwork, full artwork specifications can be found here.

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