Shouldn't It Be Simple?
I recently worked on a marketing project for a client where we needed to source, what should have been, two simple branded items. A foldable nylon hand fan and a foldable accordion-style hand fan. You’d think this would only take a few hours at most. Instead, it turned into hours and days of digging through questionable vendors, vague product pages, missing artwork specs, and cost estimator that didn’t include all costs. It’s 2025. Why is this still so hard?
Why Is This Still So Manual?
I probably went through 10 to 15 vendors. Every single one had a slightly different take on the product—but none of them made it easy to figure out what was actually being sold. You’d think by now someone would’ve cracked the code on showing product info in a way that doesn’t require a second screen and an Excel spreadsheet.
I knew what we wanted: full-color, print-to-edge fans that didn’t look cheap or fall apart after 5 uses. Is that asking too much? Umm, clearly.
Here’s what I had to hunt for, manually, every time:
Is it one-color, two-color, full-color?
Can it imprint full-bleed or is it limited to a small imprint area?
- Do they have imprint area artwork specs? (For the fan and the pouch?)
Does it come with a pouch, or is the pouch just there to make the photo look complete?
Can the pouch be imprinted? Is that extra?
Does the product image actually reflect what’s included?
- Can I get a sample?
The only companies that said they could do it were less-known or unknown. And if you aren’t careful, you could be in a hot mess . They look legit, their websites look great (most of them anyway, some not so much). Most of them have very legit-sounding domains (URLs) because they did that thing, that trickery, choosing a domain that is close to sounding like the big box providers like 4imprint.com v. imprintnow.com, or imprintnow.com.
My experience with the unknowns:
- I wasn’t able to get a sample of one of the products I was interested in
- Specs like imprint area and template downloads are either missing altogether or incomplete.
- I’m still waiting on an initial email outreach from one of the unknowns that looked legit (it’s been about 6 weeks)
- One supposedly could do the full-bleed on the nylon folding fan but their reviews on third-party channels like TrustPilot were awful in so many ways (I really wanted to try them out because I wanted the full-bleed beautiful product but just couldn’t trust it)
