Our outstanding embroidery service and EQP pricing has allowed us give some great deals this year when everyone is on a tight budget. In most situations all of our golf shirts, including Nike, Ping, Adidas, Port Authority, Sport-Tek, Gildan, and several others are available below suggested retail price.

Tiger Woods

To play like Tiger you have to look like Tiger!

Check our website below for golf tournament ideas:

The Odee Company – Promotional Products

kent@odeecompany.com
214-340-0415

The challenge of trying to sell anything in this turbulent time in American society was a scary thought when I started almost 2 months ago, but now it’s beginning to look like a challenge that we as a company are up to. We’re all still very aware that it’s not going to change over night and that it may very well get worse before it gets better. But the way we’ve positioned ourselves in this demanding time has the promise of showing benefit down the road. It’s tough to argue against a company that’s been here for 86 years, a company that owns every piece of equipment, and every building we use, a company that has made the effort to do it’s part to sustain the environment from which we demand our raw materials.

I was going through my notes over the past couple of days and was overwhelmed by the amount of material I’ve learned and how much I’m still learning every day. That’s one thing you won’t have to worry about at The Odee Company; your sales person knows what he or she is talking about, and if they don’t, they will find out very shortly. There is a lot of knowledge in this building.

Here’s a quick list of what I’ve written down over the past 7 weeks:

Presses…Paper…Coating…Liquid Ink…Toner…HP 3050 Digital… Indichrome…Humidity…Picking…Dry-back…Scum…Imposition… Folding…Cutting…Embossing…Combo Stamp…Scoring…
Saddle Stitching…Binding…P.U.R….Collating…Laminating…Drilling…
Green Printing…F.S.C….S.F.I….Recycling…

And believe me, that’s not everything, cause you’re not going to read it all anyway.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve begun to get more and more appointments with potential customers. It’s pretty rewarding for someone to respond to your email or phone call with the willingness to see how you might be able to help their company improve their products, raise awareness, or reduce their costs.

It’s been some very long days and very short nights, but the potential is definitely there.

So give me a call when you’re ready to print!

Oh, and Rescue Me starts April 7th.

Denis Leary w/ the boys from Ladder Truck 62

kent@odeecompany.com

A key factor in breaking the ice with a new customer is showing them the stability and staying power of The Odee Company.

If I may….The Odee Company is a print and promotional products distributor started here in Dallas in 1923. We are also a certified green printer with both FSC and SFI certifications. The Odee Company is completely paid for, we own our presses, our building and a warehouse; that’s savings that can be passed directly to you. You can be confident that we’ll be here when you call back in a year, or three years, to place your next order. We’re a family owned company that tries to build strong relationships with our customers. We are first and foremost a company that will do our best to make sure you walk out the door with something you’re pleased with.

You’ve got to be convinced by that!

I feel pretty blessed to be working for a company that can say all of those things.

But as a salesman, there’s more to the process than just selling the company. Sure, the company sounds great in my little speech, but I’ve got to sell myself as well. No one is going to buy thousands of dollars worth of printing from me if they don’t like me, or if I can’t seem to understand what they want. And a lot of that is going to be adapting my approach to the individual I’m visiting with that day.

Luckily I’ve been able to sell myself to teammates and coaches on the athletic field my whole life. I’m hoping that will help in the professional world.

Some very generic descriptions of people I might visit with include:

The dependable thinker, who is very neat, organized, and likes to say, “I did it.”

Then we’ve got the powerful thinker, who makes quick decisions and likes to hear, “You did it.”

There’s the friendly customer who makes more decisions with his/her feelings, and loves to hear, “No problem.”

And we’ve got the creative client, who also relies on feelings to make decisions, and loves to ask, “What if?”

The key is adapting to what makes the customer most comfortable. That doesn’t mean put on a persona that matches theirs, but just understand more about how they think so you can better understand what they want and be quicker to offer solutions that will make them happy with their purchase. Those who tend to think about purchases more might need a little more time than the ones who draw on their feelings to make buying decisions. Some take a while to judge a salesman, others make a determination in the first 30 seconds. It’s tough to adapt so quickly to so many people in the business world, but it’s necessary all the same.

What kind of customer are you?

kent@odeecompany.com

As I learn the ins and outs of selling print and promotional products, I learn that it really is a business of giving the customer what they want; giving them what they need, or giving them what will make them feel good.

Printing isn’t cheap, well, it’s not cheap if you want a quality product.

Quick example, I estimated a small quantity of door hangers today. Just regular “Do Not Disturb” door hangers. I lost the job by about $100 dollars, and I didn’t even mark it up.

That’s not a perfect example because that was a very small job that wasn’t worth very much money to us as a company who does primarily large commercial style printing. And maybe someone can do it for $100 less than I can in this economy, but I have a hard time thinking the quality is going to be the same. Guess I’ll never know.

Now don’t get me wrong, our pricing for most orders, our bread and butter, is very competitive. But let’s face it, I’ve been here a month, I don’t have a lot of examples to use, so I use what I got!

Back to sales. I’m learning that telling people right off the bat, “yes, I can do that,” or “no, I can’t do that,” is going to be beneficial in the long run. It makes no sense to tell someone that I can do something and then have to deal with the complaints when they don’t get what they want, or what they need, or what makes them feel good.

If I can make those things happen then hopefully they’re going to refer more people to me and I can spend more time giving people what they want instead of tracking down more business…..we all win!

I was taught by an old gray wolf some years ago that there are three things you can offer people when trying to sell them something, but you can only give them two:

1. Speed
2. Quality
3. Price

The idea is that if you have a high quality product that you can produce quickly, it’s not going to be cheap. If you have a high quality product that is cheap, it’s not going to be fast. If you have a product that you provide quickly at a cheap price, it’s not going to very high quality. You get the picture?

And I say this as kind-of a visual way of looking at it. Hopefully, in reality, a business as successful as we’ve been since 1923 can offer a good balance of the three.

I’ve still got a lot to learn about sales; I’ve only just scratched the surface. So please feel free to comment, dis, suggest, bash, criticize, compliment. etc.

And I’ll just delete the bad ones…

kent@odeecompany.com

Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Warren.
Warren who?
Warren anything green today?

What’s little and green and stuck to your bumper?
A leprechaun who didn’t look both ways.

Do leprechauns get angry when you make fun of their height?
Yeah, but only a little!

How can you tell if an Irishman is having a good time?
He’s Dublin over with laughter!

What’s Irish and stays out all night?
Patty O’furniture!

kent@odeecompany.com

And here’s why…

The Forest Stewardship Council (F.S.C.) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (S.F.I.) have been put in place to help maintain and sustain the forests we, as consumers of paper goods, need to run our business.

It just so happens that The Odee Company is both F.S.C. and S.F.I. certified. What does that mean? Well it means that we are actively participating in the effort to responsibly harvest the wood we need to produce our products.

We also purchase Carbon Credits which lower our carbon footprint by supporting reforestation efforts. We recycle everything we use, including paper, plates, ink, cleaning solutions, etc. We offer vegetable inks, and low V.O.C. inks.

Now on the other hand we have St. Patrick’s Day. And we all know what St. Patrick’s Day is all about right? Finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow and catching a leprechaun or something like that…

It just so happens that leprechauns live in those same forests that we are trying to sustain. So by being responsible in our use of forests, we’re actually helping to sustain wildlife, i.e. leprechauns, and plant life, as well as avoiding displacement of native tribes, and helping to replant the trees we will need down the road.

Basically, what I’m getting at is this………………

St. Patrick’s Day is all about the GREEN.

And so are we.

Most of the jobs we do at The Odee Company have to be cut down at some point. Trim marks on the sheet tell the cutter, which is a Heidelberg-Polar 115, where to cut the paper. This ranges from large sheets that are trimmed very little and folded, to sheets that are cut down very small. For example, today we cut down a piece to 3.5″ X 4″.

After a job is cut, and sometimes before, a job is usually folded, either by hand or by one of our high speed folders. These include parallel folds, right folds, letter folds, roll folds, z-folds, mast head out folds, gate folds, and several more. Different thicknesses and finishes on paper require that it be scored before it’s folded. This keeps the ink from cracking when it’s folded, sometimes this is done on the Kluge and sometimes it’s done on the folder itself. These folders are incredibly fast, folding at up to speeds of 24,000 sheets an hour.

Finally there is binding. This includes saddle stitching, which you might find on your latest Rolling Stone magazine. The saddle stitcher does what you might call stapling, but it’s actually wire that is stitched through the paper. We also have perfect-binding, which is when the pages are glued inside the cover. This might be the case with your most recent Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. We also bind with plastic coil and Wiro. These might be what you would call “spirals.” The holes are punched on our automated punch and the coils are put on by machine or by hand, depending on the size of the order.

I’d like to apologize for the extended time I kept you waiting for this post.

‘Til next time…

kent@odeecompany.com

The docutech is used mostly for high quantities of black and white printing. We were printing a manual, and some workbooks for AP classes. The AP books included some black and white photos that had fairly good quality and clarity. Odee prints and binds the AP workbooks as well as fulfilling orders for teachers. Frank keeps a detailed inventory of AP workbooks so an order can be filled quickly when placed.

I also worked with Rita on the Digital HP 3050. The digital is significantly slower than the docutech, and is typically used for orders of less than 1250 sheets. The digital prints about 1000 sheets per hour for a two sided job. Sheet size is most commonly 12″X18″. It runs 7 colors, of which all 7 can be PMS or spot colors. It also has two additional colors called indichrome, orange and purple, that when combined with the four color process increase the spectrum of colors it has the ability to run. The digital press can print on a wide variety of papers including coated paper and textured papers. It prints on anything from 60# text up to 14 pt. cover. The digital can collate, but does not bind in line. The digital prints very high quality photos as well as magnets and stickers. It’s very versatile.

These two presses sometimes combine to print the cover and guts of a piece. For example, the docutech prints the pages and digital prints the covers for the AP workbooks.

Ok, next time we’ll delve in to the vast capabilities of our bindery.

kent@odeecompany.com

Color Register – an emboss with ink on it. The emboss registers to the color.

Combo Stamp – Embossing and foil stamping at the same time. This can only be done with a single level emboss.

UV Varnish – very shiny varnish that can be put on a particular area to make a picture, word, or other image pop. UV is very harmful to the environment.

Binding:

Wiro – type of wire binding for pages of a book. (multi-colored)

Plastic Coil – plastic spiral binding. (multi-colored)

Perfect Binding – Pages are glued inside the cover. Used commonly in books.

Lay Flat Binding – Like perfect binding, but pages open and lie flat when the piece is laid on a surface.

Loose Leaf – Pages inserted in the pockets of a folder. Also used to describe punching holes in one or more sheets and putting the pages in a traditional ring binder. They range from 2 – 7 holes.

Enjoy your weekend folks. We’ll get back to it on Monday.

Our letter pressman and I worked on the letter press to cut the CD cases we had printed on the GTO. The press we were using, called a Kluge, is an old press, probably 50 or 60 years old, but when set up correctly, does a very good job of cutting and scoring the CD cases. It took us about an hour to cut 1200 CD cases. 

Our letter pressman also explained to me how to foil stamp, emboss, deboss, and score paper. The Kluge press works between 1500 and 1700 sheets per hour, with the ability to go from a sheet size of only 3″X3″ all the way up to 14″X22″. 

After our letter pressman left for the day, I went back and helped our GTO pressman with some business cards. My first thought was that for seven different sets of business card we would have at least seven different plates, but Richard explained how all seven names were on a single plate in columns. They would later be cut and boxed in the bindery. This obviously makes a lot more sense than producing a plate for each individual. It saves a lot of time and a lot of money. 

That afternoon, Buzz Tatum, owner of Odee, and I talked about some other responsibilities of the finishing department, including Blind Embossing, Color Register, Multi-level embossing, and Combo Stamping. 

Feb. 20

Friday morning, I worked in the bindery, finishing the CD job. We folded and glued the CD cases by hand. The bindery later stuffed the cases with the DVD’s to be sent out. 

Also on Friday, I went to paper-school at the Clampitt Paper Company. Most of what I learned was elaboration on what I had been taught during the week from SVP of Sales, Travis Stein, Owner, Buzz Tatum, and the pressmen at The Odee Company. 

What I hadn’t been familiar with was the process of making paper, which the folks at Clampitt did a great job of explaining. One thing I didn’t realize was all of the additives that go in to making paper, including: titanium dioxide, starch or latex, clay, calcium sulphate, rosin, defoamers to eliminate  holes, pigments, dyes, and other inclusions for aesthetics such as flecks and metalics.

We also discussed water marks and the ability to put them on paper both “wet,” meaning on the paper machine, and “off-machine,” meaning…….off the machine, after the paper is dry. 

Don Clampitt, owner of Clampitt Paper also explained the ability to coat paper both on and off the machine. Off-machine coating tends to have better quality and durability than on-machine coating.

The folks at Clampitt also explained standard sizes and weights to us, and how the system was established. Although it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, I do feel I have a pretty good understanding of it. Put simply, two papers with the same weight are not the same thickness. One just comes on a bigger sheet, and therefor weighs more as a ream. So 80# cover, with a standard sheet size of 20″X26″ isn’t the same as a 80# text, with standard sheet size of 25″X38″.

Make sense???

Good.   

Don’t fall behind, there’s more to come……

kent.c.bell@gmail.com