Proudly voted Promotional Merchandise Distributor of the Year, December 2024 (Sourcing City Awards).

Some Promotional Merchandise Nostalgia From 10 years Ago

Promotional Merchandise 10 years ago was a different ball game to the industry now. Cast your mind back - 2001 was the year when we'd all survived the 'end of the world' that had been forecast for the millennium, and Facebook hadn't even started yet. In fact, even the Internet at large was a very different animal to what we have today? Smart phones? Not quite. And Promotional Merchandise was normally stress balls, mouse mats and printed tee shirts.

In 2011 we have a whole new age of products, and an industry that is widely acknowledged within corporations as being of paramount importance for attaining and retaining clients.Promotional Merchandise, or Business Gifts or Corporate Gifts, call it what you want, is a means to tell your clients or potential clients that you care.

So what's changed in 10 years? The actual technology that goes into some of our products has HUGELY evolved. Take USB pens for example. 10 years ago, not only did the pens come in more or less just one or two shapes and patterns but the memory chips were much bigger meaning the actual memory on each device was much smaller. We can deliver 16Gb memory sticks now. 10 years ago a gigabyte wasn't possible. Then there's the actual styles available - we now have eco friendly, twig shaped and even USBs in a wrist band!

Take another product from 10 years ago - printed mouse mats. PC's were at the time, by far and away the biggest users of mouse mats but then super light laptops came along and all of a sudden people needed mouse mats that were small enough and light enough to be carried around, but also which worked with the new generation of 'optical mice'.

The environment has changed a lot in 10 years. More of the polar ice caps have disappeared and most major countries in the world have now signed up to eco initiatives and carbon reducing initiatives...eventually. Not only do we now have our very own Eco range of products, but we also try and source our products in an environmentally friendly manner too. We consider use of packaging, air and road miles and sustainability when choosing to stock all our products.

Final word is the actual number of products available. By perusing this website you'll find over 3000 products. Would you like to guess how many of these were even available 10 years ago?

Written by

Total Merchandise | Editoral Team

Our editorial team is drawn from a pool of experienced promotional merchandise product team members, account managers, marketers and other contributors. With such a wide range of skills and experience, they write about many aspects of promotional merchandise, wider marketing and business matters, as well as company news updates.

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