Customized Pens

If you’ve ever been to a professional office of some kind—whether it be a doctor’s office, a dentist’s office or some other type of business—you’ve probably seen custom printed pens with the name of the business, doctor or company imprinted on the side. Maybe you’ve seen custom tote bags, pencils or other promotional items, too. Anyone can purchase these cheap personalized pens if they know how to design them and where to get them made.

Or, maybe you’ve seen that office co-worker with the custom pen he or she uses to identify it as their own in the office and give it their own personal flair. You might wonder how to make your own custom pens in this way.

Whatever kind of customized pens you are interested in, you’ll find that actually having them made is very simple and relatively inexpensive. If you are a small business owner and want something to give your clients, or if you just want pens personalized that you know are yours, continue reading to find out how you can have your own.

What Are Some of the Uses of Customized Pens?

There are many different uses for customized pens, and some of these may be a surprise. These personalized pens are more than just tools of personal validation or something to throw away! Customized pens can be very useful if they are designed and used correctly. Here are some of the common uses of personalized pens.

Branding

Having your own customized pen is a great way to brand your business. If you are launching a new company, or if you want to breathe new life into an existing business, you should consider getting customized pens you can use in the office and give to customers. This is a way to reinforce your corporate identity, look more professional and send a message to the people you meet. Awareness of a brand has been actually shown to make customers feel safer doing business with someone. You should have some sort of logo you can place on your personalized pen, but we’ll discuss that a little later in more detail.

Advertising

Imprinted promotional pens are also a good way to advertise your company, office or firm. Pens are more likely to be used by customers and clients during the day than business cards or fridge magnets, so getting them into the hands of your patrons is basically a way to continually remind them of your business. When your customers share their pens with friends or coworkers, there will be an entirely new set of eyes seeing your logo and business information. Make sure to include contact information on your customized pens so that people who haven’t been to your office can contact you without having to look you up.

Gifts

While giving away cheap pens as gifts can seem tacky, if you have nice customized pens, the people you give them to will be pleased to use them and grateful for your gift. Avoid giving away cheap pens at corporate functions or to people you want to impress, however. Paying a little more for a much nicer pen will do more to impress potential clients because it shows them you care.

Another way you can gift pens effectively is to donate them to schools or libraries. You’ll be reaching an entirely new audience and doing a good thing at the same time. Kids who get free pens at school will bring their pens home, and their parents will see them. When the parents need the type of service or business you offer and don’t know where to turn, they’ll call you.

Employee Unity

Using customized pens, along with branding, can be a way to increase employee unity in the workplace. Your employees want to feel like they belong to something big and important, and if you have weak branding, it’s hard for them to get the big picture and vision of your company. Customized pens are a small way to reinforce that corporate image and let your employees know you’re all working together for a common cause.

For Fun

Finally, a perfectly good reason to use customized pens is for plain old fun. It’s more interesting and fun to use a pen shaped like a spine than a boring old throw-away pen. Using a pen with your logo on it can be a good way to remind yourself of your status as a business owner. It can also just be a way to show what type of person you are and let your personality out a little bit.

Whatever your reason for using customized pens, try to plan out how you’ll use your pens beforehand. For example, if you want to use your customized pens for advertising, you need to have enough made so you can give them away to customers and potential clients. You might consider having hundreds or thousands of pens made depending on how much business you do.

If you’re only using your pens for branding or just having some fun around the office, you don’t need to make as many. Try and decide this before you have them made so you don’t have too many or too few. No one wants a supply closet full of unused pens!

How Do I Make Customized Pens?

Now that you know some of the reasons for making customized pens, you probably want to know how to go about actually getting them made. This may seem daunting or overwhelming, but it’s actually a very easy process. How you make the pens will depend entirely on what type of pen you want to use.

Custom Printed Pens

If you want to use a pen for a professional application, you should probably get a custom printed pen. These pens look good and work well as promotional items. This is probably the type of pen you’ve seen professional offices give out to their patients, clients or customers. In order to have a custom printed pen made, you’ll first need to design it.

Designing Promotional Pens

Designing your own custom personalized pen isn’t a hard process, even if you don’t have any graphic design experience. Follow these simple steps to have your own pen design in a relatively short amount of time:

Decide what image or logo you want on your pen. This will depend on what the purpose is for. Are you trying to promote your business or company in general? Is there a special event coming up you want to tell people about? Or do you want a simple pen you can use over and over again as part of promotional material? If you have a marketing advisor or team, speak to them to decide these things.

Make sure to keep the details of the pen simple. If you get too intricate or complex, people won’t be able to read your pen and know who they got it from. Cluttered designs are most often ignored. Choose the most important information that can go on your pen—such as the company name, your website or phone number—and stick with that.

When determining which colors you want your pen to be, choose colors that complement each other and your company’s branding. Your customers should be able to easily read your pen and know exactly where it came from when they glance at it. Avoid choosing colors that would be too difficult to see like having purple text on a red base.

Finally, take your pen design to the company making your pen. Make sure they can actually print the design you want on your pen without any problems. Most companies will be able to do this without any problems, but it’s always good to check just to be sure.

Once you’ve done all of these steps, you’re ready to have your pens printed. If you want to do something more fancy like having pens embossed or engraved, you should talk to the individual company who will handle that to determine how to deliver your design. Still, the basic principles in steps 1 and 2 apply: keep the design simple and easy for customers to read.

Having Your Pen Made

Once you’ve actually designed your pens, you’re ready to have your personalized pens made. This is done by finding a company who can print your design on the pens. Follow these steps to make sure you get exactly what you want:

First, you need to talk to your accounting and finance department and set a budget for these pens. You can easily get caught up in spending way too much money for these pens if you don’t have a pre-set budget beforehand.

Look at different companies offering personalized pens and compare their prices and options. Some personalized pens will only cost your business $0.15 each, but the prices can go very high if you don’t pay attention. Generally speaking, you’ll pay less per pen if you order in bulk, so if you are having a pen made you can use for a long time in the future, consider purchasing them all at once.

Determine whether you want your pens to be laser engraved or screen printed. Screen printing means the logo or design is printed on the surface of your pen, while laser engraving means the design is etched into the pen. Laser engraving lasts a lot longer, but it might cost you more money in some cases.

Choose an ink color. The standard choice is black, but you may want to go with a different color depending on the message you want to send. You can also sometimes choose eco friendly ink, too.

You’ll probably have to pay a setup fee, but if your order is big enough, that fee may be waved. Don’t be afraid to chat with a customer sales representative for a fee waiver if you feel this price cut should apply to your order.

Place your order! Either upload your design or deliver it to the pen printing company however they ask you to. Then you simply have to wait until your pens are finished. The amount of time between when you order your pens and when they’re delivered varies, but it might be as little as one week for some companies. You can usually pay more if you need pens sooner than later.

Your pens will usually be mailed to your office (or whatever address you give the company). If you ordered your pens from a local company, you can sometimes pick them up in person to save money on shipping costs. If your pens have to be shipped across the country, or sometimes across the globe, the shipping can be somewhat expensive when compared to the cost of each pen. The greater awareness your customers will have of your brand and services will be worth it, though.

Can promotional pens be a good way to increase the promotional efforts of your business? Have you talked with your marketing team to know if creating customized pens will be a good way to support your company’s branding, build unity among employees and get your name out there more often? These are important questions, and their answers will help you determine whether or not you should make customized pens. As you can see, it’s not difficult to design and have customized pens made, and the cost is usually very reasonable, so consider having pens made.

Conclusion

If you want a simple way to increase trust and loyalty in your company, customized pens can be the way to go. Pens custom printed with your business’s logo, name and contact information are a very low key and low cost way to advertise your business and let your customers know you’re serious. Personalized pens can also be a way to reinforce the branding of your company and create a corporate image. They don’t have to be difficult to design—in fact, the simpler the design, the better they are—and you can easily have them made at local print shops and online. Talk to your marketing team today and decide whether or not customized pens are the answer for your business.