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Two More Fun Sea Life Promotions

Here are two more fun Dolphin promotional items to follow up my last post:

This sleek Dolphin Shaped Massager:

And the Dolphin Insert Beach Ball:

Shark Attacks Cause Stress - Try a Shark Stress Toy ;)

Tonight we had a family night. After the prayer, songs and a lesson about gratitude, the kids and I watched Shark Attack! on DVD an interesting NOVA special originally aired on PBS in 1997. It is fascinating how frightening these animals are, and how the public continues to act with fear disproportionate to the actual and statistical danger that these magnificent creatures pose.

My boys love sharks, and they watched with rapt attention. My oldest son wants to be a scientist, and he really gets into shows like this. One thing that I found interesting is that the tiger shark actually poses a greater danger than the Great White shark, because they tend to be more aggressive.

I decided to quickly take a glance and see if we have any promotional items on our website related to sharks and other sea life. We did have a few. The only ones that we have are stress toy shapes. Here are the different ones that we carry:

Shark Stress Toy
Dolphin Stress Toy
Killer Whale Stress Toy
Humpback Whale Stress Reliever
Lobster Stress Toy
Octopus Stress Reliever

A shark would make a great little gift to reward aggressive sales goals met, while a whale could be a great giveaway for a record month of revenue. The lobster would make a great promotion for a seafood distributor, while the dolphin would be useful for an environmental or educational campaign.

Bedtime

I didn't get much sleep last night. My wife is pregnant and she was not feeling well. This will be a short post as I am about to pitch over of exhaustion right now and start drooling all over the keyboard.

Since I'm so tired, I thought of the perfect promotion to throw up on the blog, before crawling into bed. It's a Warm/Cold Eye Mask that would calm even the most stressed day. Good night.

Warm / Cold Promotional Eye Masks

Hacking With Friends: Why Even A Beginner Loves Golf

Golf is a great game. This is coming from someone who hasn't even played the game much. About ten years ago, I went golfing for the first time. A friend from my Church took me to a very hilly (and difficult) nine hole course and taught me the basics of the game. I only played a couple more times over the next eight years, but then this last year I went multiple times, and I even participated in a scramble. My shot is improving, and the better you become, the more you love the game.

I like golf so much, because every time I have played the game, I have played it with friends, and just the time spent jesting, and talking and teasing is the stuff good friendships are made of. For the same reasons golf is good for friends, it is good for business. It builds relationships, yet most of the competitions is really against yourself. Businesses are built best on this mentality, where colleagues are working to deliver their personal best, and their lives are being enhanced by relationships.

Here are some great golf promotional products and golf accessories to give to your co-players out on the links.

And here are two of my favorites:

1. Stainless Steel Folding Zippo Golf Tool
2. Golf Clik Clak Mints

After moving from Utah to Oregon, I became acutely aware of the practical nature of the umbrellas as a corporate promotional product. I've always thought umbrellas were cool devices. I loved how a push button umbrella extends and shoots out almost like a weapon and then quickly expands open.

When I was a boy, I would pretend that an umbrella was a weapon. It was both a sword and a shield. I guess the mechanism of the umbrella is a simple fascination with me.

A promotional umbrella can be decorated in multiple ways. The most common is a screen print on a single or multiple panels. Because an umbrella has multiple panels, a cool application is to put a different message on each panel or on every other panel. I have seen embroidery on an umbrella. I used to have a nice Ritz Carlton umbrella with gold metallic embroidery, but I don't think I would recommend it as a rule, because the nylon fabric or polyester fabric from which many umbrellas are made tends to pucker when embroidered and then stretched tight. It looked okay on the sample that I had, but I think a simple silk-screened imprint is slicker and more polished way to go.

You can also have umbrellas done with all over four color process printing, which is an awesome custom promotion. However, I believe that the minimum quantities for this kind of a logo treatment are quite high (maybe in the 500-1000 piece range) and I would count on a minimum of a 90 day lead time as this is done custom overseas.

Three of my favorite suppliers of promotional umbrellas are: Peerless Umbrella, Avaline, and Rainkist. All three of them are reliable, high performance suppliers and do good work.

I really like the innovative aspects of the patented Rainkist Windefyer. It has a unique Square Canopy shape, and the double overlapping canopy funnels wind to prevent umbrella from inverting. It has a 64" arc and a pinch proof runner to protect fingers and then a comfortable squishi gel handle. It is a little spendy as an advertising specialties umbrella, but if you are looking for a nice gift for your next conference or trade show, this would be a winning idea.