Our Favourite Promotional Products Created During the Queen’s Life

Today Queen Elizabeth II has become the longest reigning UK monarch, passing her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who reigned for 63 years and 7 months. A lot has changed in the queen's life including some pretty revolutionary new technology, in this blog post we'll be looking at some of the most revolutionary products in the Total Merchandise catalogue.

The Ball Point Pen

This everyday item feels like it's been around forever. The ballpoint pen as we know it today was first created in 1938 by Lazlo Biro, a Hungarian newspaper writer who was frustrated at having to refill his fountain pen. Biro created a company in Austria and started creating these ballpoint pens. After the Biro ballpoint pen's success, other companies started to produce their own resulting in a variety of different types of pens, including pens using different inks such as rollerball pens.

A pen is a fantastic promotional product as people often use them and having them draw your branded pen out of their pocket can be a great way to spread your company's logo and message.

Rumour has it: During the space race, the US spent millions developing a pen that could write in zero gravity while the Russians simply used a pencil.

USB Sticks

The USB stick is a little more recent than the ballpoint pen, it was first brought to market by IBM in 2000. The USB flash drive made it much easier to transfer data from computer to computer compared to CDs and floppy disks. The first USB sticks could store 8MB of data while today's capacities of up to 2TB are being planned.

A USB is another very useful promotional product, they are small enough to go on either a keyring or slip into the pocket and in the electronic age are always being used to hand over documents or other data. A USB stick with your brand on could be used often and seen by many, perfect for technological firms or almost any industry.

At Total Merchandise, we offer USB sticks in all shapes and sizes, including some in the form of business cards. These 21st-century business cards could be used to hold contact details and perhaps a portfolio of previous work, ready to hand to a potential client.

Rubik's Cube

We've all got a Rubik's Cube somewhere in the home. It was invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor Erno Rubik. Rubik's Cubes were probably most popular in the 1980s however are still used by 'speedcubers' today, these are people who try to complete the cubes as quickly as they can. Speedcuber competitions are held worldwide.

Rubik's Cubes can be purchased from Total Merchandise printed with your company colours and with various images that are relevant to your company on each face, maybe one of your cubes will end up at a Rubik's Cube world event!

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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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