small business

It’s that time of year again — the ever-exciting tax season. 2018 brought with it a number of changes to tax laws, including alterations that affect how small and mid-sized businesses, like most promotional products companies, should be filing. Idea Custom Solutions doesn’t want you to be left in the dark when you work on your business taxes, so we’ve compiled some tips and helpful things to get your business through tax time without incident.

By 2021, research firm Cybersecurity Ventures expects financial damages from cybercrime to small businesses will reach a cost of $6 trillion. We hate to break it to you, but promotional products companies and other small businesses are a prime target for malware.

It’s a sad fact of life: two-thirds of full-time employees are either completely stressed out at work or already in a state of burnout. According to The American Institute of Stress, that is the result of a few different factors. An employee’s workload accounts for 46 percent of that stress, interpersonal issues at work is 28 percent and job security and work-life balance is 6 percent.

At times, the promotional products industry can lag behind when it comes to technology, but it’s never too late to catch up. If you haven’t been implementing SEO best practices for your website, Idea Custom Solutions is here to help.

As we’ get ready to start a new fiscal year, some of you may be reviewing your budget and realizing you need to trim some of the fat. With custom apparel embroidery businesses, one of the first things people suggest is moving digitizing in-house. Cut the costs of outsourcing and you save your company the money, right? Wrong. Whatever you’re saving in cost, you’ll likely end up spending more in lost time. Here’s why it’s more expensive and less productive to DIY your digitizing.

After 26 years of sales tax rules, the Supreme Court recently overturned a 1992 decision from the Quill Corporation v. North Dakota case. This decision will change the way many companies handle online transactions and business — including those in the promotional products industry that run online stores.

Creating a logo is more than just throwing together an image with a fun font and bright colors. Truly successful companies, such as Starbucks and Target, know the key to logo design actually lies in the psychology behind it. Each choice, from shape to color to font, delivers a specific message to customers.

2017 is a wrap! Now it’s time to focus on propelling your business and your clients’ companies forward into 2018. To succeed, it’s important to thoroughly evaluate the marketing landscape. You should take the time to ask, what are the top trends in promotional product marketing going to be in the new year?

It's been said that "imitation is the greatest form of flattery". That concept has inspired some of the best works in popular music, comedy and fine arts for ages. But when it comes to crafting corporate identities and brands, copying other designs is not a good idea. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) should always strive to be unique.