Who is Crazier... Our Clients... Or Us?

In another out-of-hand situation, a client we occasionally do business with asked us to sponsor a branded product for a high school youth tournament. We don't do any business with the school, but in consideration of wanting to help the kids and our client, we offered to do the agreed upon product at a greatly reduced cost.

Having been in this industry for MANY years, I knew that collecting sponsors' logos for these types of events is problematic. They usually come in the form of JPEG images you can't do anything with, or the classic "yes, I have my logo... here it is on this napkin."

To meet the "in hands" date, and prepare for what was probably coming, I padded the date I needed artwork accordingly. That day passed. With the event date looming, in came the bad logos. Since nothing was production ready, I called my good friend Brad Cairns from Promo-Cast to prepare the artwork. At this last-minute deadline, and with no direction from the client, we did the best we could "guessing" what they wanted.

With only a single day to approve and move the order ahead, the client requested two more large changes, one involving a lousy bad clip art image they sent over to add and then later the image of an embroidery job to be redrawn and included. Brad's skill and commitment to giving the client what they wanted is to be commended.

At 5:20 p.m. that day, the client emailed requesting we change some things around AGAIN. At that point, my answer was NO, we needed to go with what we had. Thankfully we were able to move forward. With such a short deadline, again I was glad the order was going to our trusted supplier to get this job done in the short time we had. Kudos to our friends at Pro Towels for making their part happen without incident also.