July 2016 – ImageBlog

Our sister company has a brand new name and website – with an expanded business focus on the power of personalization! Extreme Awards & Personalization continues to “Make it Personal” by creating one-of-a-kind award and recognition products for your staff, donors or clients that represent your unique brand and strengthen a personal connection with your business.

Extreme Awards & Personalization, located side-by-side with ImageSmith, works individually with each client to create custom awards, trophies, plaques, personalized corporate merchandise, signage and much more. Visit them at www.extremeap.com and be sure to read the following announcement for more in-depth info about their newly expanded production capabilities and product offerings.

We’re excited by the continued growth of our partnership! Together, we are committed to helping you craft and promote your brand, and to meet all your evolving marketing needs in one place.

Extreme Awards & Personalization Announces Strategic Investment and Partnership to Serve Southeast Customers

July 2016

ARDEN, NC – Almost two years into its business transformation, Extreme Awards & Personalization is pleased to announce a strategic investment and partnership to enhance its products and services. The company serves corporate, competition, and charity customers in the southeast who use custom awards, personalized corporate merchandise and signage to create brand fans and ambassadors.

Organizations today are working harder than ever to win and keep customers, employees, and donors. Personalized awards and recognition programs are a simple, low-cost way to honor or reward high achievers and increase their engagement. Consider the following:

Corporate: Spending just one minute recognizing an employee drives 100 minutes of extra initiative. In addition, four out of five engaged employees are willing to serve as brand ambassadors, recommending their corporation’s products and services to others. Source: Accumulate.
Competition: Sports trophies justly honor exceptional athletes, and participation trophies can encourage younger athletes to stay the game and develop skills, teamwork, and problem solving.
Charity: Recognizing donors can decrease industry-average attrition rates of 57%, significantly impacting the bottom line. Source: CauseVox.

Extreme Awards & Personalization recently invested in a GoVivid Breeze™ UV LED printer to expand its production capabilities and support its customers in their efforts to run and grow their businesses. The new printer enables customers to move beyond plastic and metal to produce full-color products on innovative materials.

The company also announces a strategic partnership with regional powerhouse, ImageSmith, a full-service printing and marketing services firm. The two sister companies are located side-by-side in Arden, North Carolina, providing customers with easy access to one-stop shopping for all their printing, marketing, and awards needs.

Extreme Awards & Personalization was formed in 2014, when Patricia Lahepelto, the former marketing communication head of a global manufacturer, purchased engraving technology assets to build a new company. The company’s full product offering is available online at www.extremeap.com.

“Our goal is to serve the southeast market with a broader range of recognition and awards products and a more consultative approach than traditional awards & engraving companies,” says Lahepelto. The daughter of ImageSmith CEO Mary Smith, Lahepelto is a life-long Asheville resident with a strong commitment to the community. She personally works with customers to design awards that meet their brand requirements and budget and oversees the team that manufactures them onsite.

About Extreme Awards & Personalization

Extreme Awards & Personalization empowers corporate, competition, and charity customers to create brand fans and ambassadors through the power of recognition. The company offers a full product line of customizable, personalized awards, trophies, plaques, name badges, plates, signs, engraved products, and more.

Extreme Awards & Personalization is the sister company of ImageSmith, Western North Carolina’s premier printing and marketing firm. The two companies are co-located in a 21,000-foot production space in Arden, NC. Extreme Awards & Personalization is a woman-owned local manufacturing company serving customers in the southeast U.S.

For more information, please contact:

Extreme Awards & Personalization: Jorja Smith, Operations Manager, 828-684-5348 or jorja.smith@extremeap.com. Website: www.extremeap.com

Extreme Awards & Personalization: Patricia Lahepelto, General Manager, 828-279-6340 or patricia.lahepelto@extremeap.com. Website: www.extremap.com

GoVivid ™ www.govividusa.com

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Call ImageSmith at 828.684.4512 for any marketing needs. As a printer, we understand communication and design. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmentally responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.

Color is one of the foundational elements of graphic design and visual marketing both in print or online. Pondering color choice in the brands that surround us and the possible reasons behind those choices can be enlightening – so over a few occasional blog posts we will take a quick look at the local Asheville area and check out who feels blue, wants you to see red, and so on. Now about blue…

Blue is a winner worldwide in the “what is your favorite color” category. And while colors can shift meanings across cultures (blue in America can mean sad, while in Germany, drunk and in Russia, gay), the color of the sky and the sea is so integral to life on earth that it’s popularity in logo design is no surprise. Generally speaking, dark blue can represent trust, authority, stability, intelligence – while lighter shades evoke feelings of peace, spirituality, infinity and calm.

Whose brand invests in blue on an international scale? Well the tech world certainly embraced this color: Twitter, Facebook, Pandora, Skype, LinkedIn, Google Earth, intel, IBM, HewlettPackard, Samsung… whew! The list goes on. AT&T, WalMart, Ford, and Boeing are also a few traditional powerhouses who have dressed in blue for many years.

As we discussed in our quick look at the color red in Part 1: the challenge for marketers is to choose appropriate colors to work within the context of the larger message they hope to create and the product or service that represents. It is never as simple as “blue = trust.” Blue doesn’t draw more customers then red to trust one company over another. But blue, when used in the appropriate context, can help successfully attach specific feelings and energy to the experience of a brand. (For a clearer, more thorough discussion on that, here’s a great article about the importance and complexity of color in marketing.)

All this can begin to sound like a lot of psychological hoo-ha (a technical term) except for the fact that as humans we react emotionally to color, and we recall a set of connoted meanings attached to that visual experience. Smart marketing uses this to advantage through consistent branding, establishing a positive connection and memory through color.

So who chose blue in the Asheville area to speak for their business or organization? A lot of successful folks rely on the cleanliness, coolness and dignity of beautiful blue:

It’s no secret that Asheville itself has been a desirable destination both for tourists and new residents, and the city itself is branded with blue. In print media, PMS 661 is Asheville’s color – a dark, rich blue that leans toward the royal side. Blue is an obvious fit for an area nicknamed “Land of the Sky” and located at the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Two things that definitely say “Asheville” are beer and Tourists’ baseball. Both brand with blue. The Asheville Brewers Alliance promotes craft beer and breweries in Western North Carolina, representing by my count 36 local breweries! The Asheville Tourists are the local minor league baseball team, a farm team of the Colorado Rockies. They’ve been a part of Asheville as far back as 1897.

Education in our local area thrives on the blues! The Bulldogs of UNC Asheville brand with PMS 654. But other shades are also used for the Asheville School, Montreat College, Warren Wilson in Swannanoa, Mars Hill in nearby Madison County and South College Asheville. Blue clearly must stand for fine education and a commitment to scholarship.

When blue is part of your name, it’s pretty obvious that blue stands a good chance of being in some, if not all, of your logo and branding. The Blue Ridge Mountains themselves lend both their name and color to local professional enterprises like Blue Ridge Orthodontics, Blue Ridge Bone & Joint, and many other medical and dental practices. Another example, the Blue Dream Curry House is a natural for blue. The downtown high-rise Hotel Indigo uses a whole palette of colors in their stylish branding, but with a name like Indigo, it includes a deep blue as well.

Blue works across the gamut of businesses in successful branding: from the popular eatery Sunny Point Cafe in West Asheville to the pro bono legal experts at Pisgah Legal Services. Asheville Savings Bank, first chartered in 1936, uses trustworthy blue as well.

And of course, we’re a fan of blue around here, too – specifically PMS 549.

Call us at 828.684.4512 for any marketing needs. As a printer, we understand communication and design. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmentally responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

ImageSmith is now partnered with Extreme Awards & Personalization – our in-house partner providing custom engraved trophies and awards for employee recognition programs, sporting events, and promotional needs. With our new sister company, we will be sharing space, resources and expertise in a collaboration designed to further provide you with one place to meet all of your marketing needs… Under One Roof! Visit them online at www.extremeap.com or call direct at 828.684.4538.

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.

Month: July 2016

Branding with a Personal Approach: Extreme Awards & Personalization

Extreme Awards & Personalization Announces Strategic Investment and Partnership to Serve Southeast Customers

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.

Asheville Blues: Color Choice in Local Branding

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.