http://www.promotionalmerchandiseblog.co.uk/">Our Impression – The Promotional Merchandise Blog from LSi

WOW – another amazing night at the Annual Promota Awards, where all the gift industry gets together and decides who has performed well in the past 12 months. I am delighted to report that LSi scooped two awards, the first being “Distributor of the Year 2010 (North)” beating off some fierce competition from fellow competitors to be crowned the best in the North by our supply partners! A result which is a fantastic reflection on the whole team, as the suppliers take into account all aspects of our service, including paying our bills!

This award is even more satisfying as we have now collected this accolade 3 out of the past 5 years – an unprecedented achievement!

On a personal note I was extremely proud if not a little embarrassed to receive the Roger Saunders Award for “Outstanding Services to the Industry”. Having spent 22 years in the industry that I love, I have been able to do many things with LSi and within the industry, but receiving this award I don’t feel I have finished achieving and my contributions to improving the industry and the service we offer will not stop on the back of this award. Nevertheless it was great to receive it and despite the mickey takes from my so called friends over retirement and being compared to Robbie Williams and his Brit lifetime award, all I will say is – we can all sing a bit when asked to, but ask Robbie where to get 500 pens printed in 3 days – he has no idea!

I rest my case!

Finally my long suffering wife has always said “you do not receive a medal for staying up drinking till the small hours at these industry events!” – how wrong was she!!

Thanks for all who voted for the company – much appreciated.

Its 11:30pm Sunday evening, my kids are all in bed, resting before another week of school, football and dancing. My wife’s just gone to feed Alfie (2 month old) and I’m still sat here putting the finishing touches to the new LSi website. Why is it, no matter how hard you try to be organised there is always something left while the eleventh hour! Literally!

So this is my first blog on our new Merchandise blog, created by Scott Brown our web designer, and i have to say he has done a fantastic job of our new website  - I’m really pleased with the look and feel, and believe it will keep improving as we add more content and features over the coming months.

Also would like to take this opportunity to mention, that we recently came runner up in the BPMA (British Promotional Merchandise Association) awards for Website of the year. Just getting nominated in the top 5 was a major achievement, so Scott should be proud of his effort for the past year, he really deserved the recognition.

So all is looking good for 2010, we finished January slightly down on the previous year in terms of sales, but after a record December I can’t really complain. But more importantly we have just had a fantastic week at LSi, on Tuesday we were informed we had been successful in wining a major tender from one of our largest customers. After weeks of work replying to the tender, and work on a presentation pitch, we have been rewarded with a 3 year contract (subject to signing) to supply clothing and merchandise Europe wide for a large worldwide organisation! The hard work starts now!  But this is a major coup for LSi and I believe could be the stepping stone we needed to move up a level and become stronger across Europe.

We have also mailed out 1500 merchandise packs and our first newsletter to active customers, which should hit on Monday, these consist of a highlighter pen, 5 x senator pens, sweets, post it notes, coaster and a mousemat and are all branded with our new logo “Make an impression”, so next week will hopefully be a busy one also.

Just found out we’ve been nominated at the forthcoming Promota awards for Distributor of the year (North of England) for the fifth year running, we have won this award in 2007 and 2008 so it would be great to win for anniversary year, but being nominated is good enough and testament to the fantastic staff I am fortunate to have working with me at LSi.

After visiting some industry trade shows, we have uncovered some fantastic new products which will be featured shortly on the website, so keep checking back and hope you have a good week.

Lloyd