How To Save Money On Printing Personalized Birthday Gifts

Getting personalized birthday gifts means you’re getting the ideal present to celebrate someone’s special day. If you’re interested in getting a good deal on printing personalized birthday gifts, there are some tricks to save some cash. Here are some ways you can cut costs.

1. Shop around. This obvious money saver is one missed by many shoppers. However, doing a little planning ahead to compare costs between different shops can get you the best deal.
2. Pick one color. If you’re printing, have your design in one color rather than multiple colors. Whether it’s a t-shirt, bag, or hat for the birthday boy or girl, printers charge more for each additional color you add to the design.
3. Buy in bulk. Check to see where the price point changes are. It might be worth your while to buy a few extra pieces to drop the price per item if you’re personalizing birthday gifts for the whole party.
4. If you’re doing a large order of personalized birthday gifts, always get written quotes – preferably from more than one printing shop.

How To Save Money On Printing Personalized Birthday Gifts

CustomInk Tip: Printing personalized birthday gifts gives you a lot of options for customizing something for the birthday recipient or the whole birthday party. Go with humorous personalized birthday gifts like printed t-shirts. For kids or kids at heart, personalized birthday gifts can include a birthday bear with printed t-shirts. Or go for a stylish tee with a trendsetting design for sweet 16 or 21st birthdays.

Personalize It With Your Own Custom Labels

Rather than spending the money to print custom labels for a gift, get resourceful and make your own. Using a self-adhesive printing paper and your imagination, you can create labels to personalize just about anything. Take an empty wine bottle or olive oil bottle, clean it out, fill it with bite sized candies, and seal it back up. Add a personalized label that you designed on self-adhesive printing paper and you have an affordable custom gift. Custom labels work well as decorative items, too. Make custom labels to add to candles, journals, gift bags and boxes. Your custom labels can also be as simple as a printed photo.

Cheap Tricks For Packaging Up Personalized Gifts

If you’re looking for packaging for personalized gifts, you don’t have to drop a lot of cash to do it. By getting a little creative, you can have packaging for personalized gifts on a budget. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Personalized Photo Gift Bags – You don’t have to go through the trouble of ordering gift bags in bulk to personalize them. If you’ve got just a few, why not create personalized photo gift bags? Take a solid colored gift bag and affix a photo with tacky glue. Use a sheet of colored craft paper to cut out a “frame” for the photo. Glue it on and you’ve got an instant personalized photo gift bag.

“Monogrammed” Stencil Tote – This is a cute addition to any light-colored cotton tote bag. You can create a “monogram” with your own letter stencil. Position your letter stencil over the tote and use fabric paint in the color of your choice to fill in the letter.

Personalized Wrapping Paper – Take either brown or white Kraft paper and wrap it around a gift as you normally would. Then get creative and personalize it. You can use ink stamps to decorate the person’s initials on the personalized wrapping paper. Use stencils to create a custom pattern or use your artistic skills to illustrate your own artwork.

Personalize Your Own Tee With Freezer Paper Stenciling

Sure, you can go to the t-shirt printer and have the hassle and cost of ordering your own tee, but why do that when you can personalize your own tee in just a few easy steps? You can use freezer paper to create a stencil. One way to create the stencil is by creating the template with a pencil or ballpoint pen and trimming out the words or image with a pen-knife on top of a mat cutting board. Or you can create the outline of the image on your computer and print it directly onto the freezer paper. Next, position the shiny side of the freezer paper onto the t-shirt, iron the freezer paper to the tee without steam, and use fabric paint to create your personalized t-shirt. Take care to remove the freezer paper right away to allow the paint to dry evenly. It’s an instant easy solution to personalize your own tee!

Monogram It Yourself To Cut Costs

Save yourself the expense of buying high-priced monogrammed items like towels, robes and PJ’s and monogram them on your own. You can buy the exact items you want rather than having to pay the marked up price from a retailer who has chosen the design. If you have access to a computerized sewing machine, you can use their pre-programmed monogram stitch patterns. However, you can also try embroidery with free motion as well. To do this, draw the letter onto the fabric itself or use a piece of water-soluble stabilizer. For terry cloth pieces, it makes sense to use a water-soluble stabilizer that you can place over the fabric as a pattern. Then select a narrow wooden hoop or spring hoop for your thread. A 30-weight or 40-weight machine embroidery thread will work best for the monogram.

Four Ways To Get Discounts On Personalized Items

Getting discounts on personalized items can take a little bit of planning and research. However, if you’re willing to do the legwork when buying personalized items, you can find some good deals. Here are some ideas for snagging the discounts.

• Find a store where you like shopping for personalized items and sign up for their mailing lists. You’ll be notified of sales and be privy to discounts.
• Check if the store has a discount for signing up for their credit card. You can often get a discount on your first purchase and you’ll be able to use it for buying personalized items.
• Hit the sales for personalized items you don’t have to monogram or engrave yourself. Items like scarves, soaps and purses come monogrammed with just about every letter there is.
• Shop online at large volume retailers which carry personalized products. Online retailers like OrientalTrading.com carry a large selection of gifts you can personalize at affordable prices.

Using Coupon Codes For Discounted Personalized Gifts

Buying personalized gifts doesn’t mean you have to forgo savings. In fact, if you use coupon codes, you don’t have to pay full price while shopping online with a number of major retailers. You just have to do a little research online and then enter the coupon code when you’re at the checkout page. It also helps if you check back on the sites often for updates. Here are some suggestions for where you can look to find personalized gifts.

Retailmenot.com – This site has a great search engine to let you seek discount codes for a number of online shopping resources where you can buy personalized gifts. Companies like Harry & David and Things Remembered typically come up in a search. Find discounts such as 20 percent off coupons and five dollars off coupons.

DealNews.com – Conduct a search or click on one of their categories. They have discount coupon codes for things like free shipping and discounts off minimum purchases. You can also find percentage discounts for online sites like PersonalizationMall.com.

UltimateCoupons.com – Find discount coupons for just about every major retailer that offers a deal. UltimateCoupons.com has featured freebies to Proflowers.com and Snapfish - perfect if you want to give away personalized photos as gifts.

CouponMountain.com- Trying to find discount coupons for a luxury gift retailer like Red Envelope? You might be able to get free shipping with a minimum purchase. Try doing a search to see if you can get a discount for a photo retailer like Shutterfly.

Finding a Discounted Personalized Gift

If you're looking for a great quality personalized gift, don't be shy to shop in your local DollarSavers or $1 stores. A lot of these stores have a runoff of surplus gifts that other stores couldn't sell.

1. Do not buy food products unless the person who is receiving the gift is very much into a certain food type like Vegan or any ethnic food. Chocolates unless used on Valentine's Day are a very generic gift.

2. Try to find a unique product within the area of interest: For example, if you know the person likes Africa, try finding something over e-bay that is from Africa and unique only to that country. Not something you might find right here in the U.S. Do a quick online search for that area of interest suitable to the person and try to find something important in that area still within your budget.

3. Wrapping counts. Theme wrapping is great when it can be accomplished. If you're wrapping about an African gift, use brown postal paper and stamp it with henna and brown colors. If you have kids, use them to do this as a project for creating wrapping paper. Tie it with a dyed and/or natural mix of colored raffia as a finishing touch. You could fashion the gift label in the form of a baggage claim ticket. Those types of templates can be downloaded from the internet.

Let your creativity take over. Remember, its not the cost of the gift, its the uniqueness of it.