Guide to Local, On-Demand Production: Maintaining Brand Consistency with Ciloo
At the end of 2024, freight rates stood at 115% above the pre-pandemic average. Rising shipping costs, together with new sustainability regulations and socio-political pressures, are driving a shift towards local production. This trend extends to physical marketing assets, such as sales material, merchandise, and swag. Local production allows companies to connect with diverse audiences, achieve significant cost savings, and embrace more sustainable practices. Producing closer to the point of use minimizes shipping distances and lead times, while reducing environmental impact. This decentralized approach, however, presents a significant challenge for marketers: how to preserve brand consistency across a decentralized production network.
In this guide, we’ll explore how brands can successfully leverage local, on-demand production while maintaining a cohesive and impactful brand identity.
Why Brand Consistency Matters
Brand consistency entails a holistic experience across all touch points, including merchandise, swag, and sales materials. These items are often the most visible and memorable representations of a brand. In a decentralized production model, maintaining this consistency across these physical assets requires a nuanced approach that balances global standards with local market needs.
While visual identity is a crucial component of brand consistency, there are other factors that contribute to a strong brand, including consistent messaging, consistent quality, and customer experience. Brand inconsistency erodes customer trust, dilutes brand perception, and has the potential to impact revenue.
While it’s important to maintain core brand elements, brands must also be adaptable to cultural differences and local preferences when designing and selecting merchandise and creating sales materials. This might involve tailoring designs or even the types of items offered to resonate with specific demographics. Without a doubt, the challenge lies in adapting to local needs without compromising the brand’s fundamental principles.
The challenges of global brand management
Maintaining a consistent brand identity globally is not easy. But beyond this challenge, brands are also navigating additional hurdles and costs:
- Traceability: New regulatory requirements call for added transparency on the origin and journey of products. Managing this level of oversight for marketing collateral and promotional items is difficult, especially when production is distributed across multiple local suppliers. Without a centralized platform providing a comprehensive view of the supply chain, ensuring compliance, and filling in sustainability reports becomes a mammoth task.
- Logistics Costs: Brand management systems relying on centralized production face rising logistics costs. As the Logistics Managers’ Index (LMI) reported, in December, the growth rate of transportation prices reached its highest level in over two years, with a sentiment of 66.8—an increase of 3 percentage points from November. This surge is linked to strong consumer demand and record e-commerce deliveries. Rising costs put pressure on profit margins and necessitate careful management of logistics across the entire company.
- Global Trade Uncertainties: The imposition of (or threat of) new tariffs creates an unpredictable business environment. These factors can disrupt supply chains, inflate costs, and introduce significant uncertainty into production planning. By producing locally, brands can mitigate the impact of tariffs, customs delays, and global trade uncertainties, streamlining their supply chains and gaining greater control over costs and timelines.
Building a strong foundation for brand control
Maintaining brand consistency across a local production network requires a robust foundation built on centralized resources, streamlined workflows, and controlled access that allows for empowered, decentralized orders. These elements work together to ensure that everyone involved in the creation and production of branded materials is working from the same playbook, adhering to the same standards, and utilizing only approved assets. Let’s go into these elements one by one:
1. Centralized resources: A single source of truth for all brand assets and guidelines is essential. A digital asset management (DAM) system serves this purpose, acting as a central repository for logos, style guides, approved imagery, messaging documents, and any other materials related to the brand. This centralized platform ensures everyone has access to the most up-to-date and approved versions of brand assets, eliminating the risk of outdated or incorrect materials.
2. Streamlined workflows: Efficient communication and collaboration are crucial for maintaining brand consistency across digital assets and physical products. Integrating the DAM system with other business systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, can streamline workflows and improve communication between departments. Streamlined workflows reduce the risk of errors, minimize delays, and ensure everyone is on the same page throughout the production process.
3. Access controls and permissions: Single Sign On (SSO) provides a secure and efficient way to manage access and permissions. Additionally, granular permission settings allow administrators to define different levels of access, ensuring that users only have access to the assets and functionalities relevant to their roles. Controlled access helps prevent unauthorized use of brand materials, protects brand integrity, and ensures consistency across all touchpoints.
Transforming Digital Assets into Physical Products
Brand consistency is truly tested when turning digital assets into tangible physical products. Ensuring consistency across merchandise, swag, sales materials, and other branded items is crucial to brand integrity. Let’s look into how Ciloo facilitates this.
How does Ciloo bridge the gap between digital and physical?
Ciloo seamlessly transforms digital assets into high-quality physical products, ensuring brand consistency every step of the way. For clients with an existing DAM system, the DAM serves as the single source of truth. With a Ciloo-powered webshop, users can access editable templates for products such as business cards, brochures, and promotional items, and ready-to-order product listings. Templates allow for necessary customizations, like individual contact information, while ensuring adherence to brand guidelines. In just a few clicks, users across the company can order brand-compliant materials. For administrators and select users, Ciloo’s product creator provides a self-service tool to easily add new product listings, offering additional efficiency and control. All orders are produced locally and on-demand.
How does Ciloo choose its suppliers?
Our carefully curated global network of vetted and certified suppliers forms the backbone of our ability to deliver consistent, high-quality branded materials anywhere in the world. This is how we do it:
Vetted and certified suppliers: Ciloo employs a rigorous selection process to ensure every supplier meets our standards for quality, reliability, and ethical practices. This approach ensures that brands partnering with Ciloo can trust their products are being produced by reputable and capable partners. We continually monitor supplier performance and maintain close relationships to ensure ongoing compliance and easier sustainability reporting for our clients. Learn more about our production network here.
On-demand production: The Ciloo network provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to meet clients’ fluctuating needs. Whether your brand needs to ramp up production for a product launch, scale down following a campaign, or fulfill a last-minute request, our network can adapt seamlessly. This allows brands to respond quickly to market opportunities, avoid costly delays or overstocking, and cater to immediate needs without compromising quality or brand consistency.
How does Ciloo ensure consistency across color and material?
Printing is a chemical process and various factors, from the printing machine and its settings to the paper type and even the environment within the production facility – can impact the final product’s quality. Even when producing sales material in the same facility, using the same printers and paper type, variations can occur. Two significant determinants are machines and paper types. Our network printers utilize high-quality equipment, and we ensure that we print on the same paper types across the network. While 100% consistency over a global network is impossible, Ciloo manages to get as close as possible.
Branded merchandise, such as t-shirts, tumblers, and other promotional items also have specific consistency challenges. For apparel, fabric type, dye lots, and printing methods (screen printing, DTG, embroidery) impact the final look. For items like tumblers, materials (stainless steel, food-grade silicone, ceramic), manufacturing processes, and decoration techniques (laser engraving, pad printing) can influence the final product. Ciloo works with specialized suppliers for these product categories, ensuring they adhere to brand guidelines for materials, decoration methods, and quality control. We manage the complexities of these diverse production processes, maintaining brand consistency across all branded merchandise, from print materials to promotional products.
Because Ciloo relies on local production, we avoid the inefficiencies and environmental impact of centralized sourcing. We don’t ship paper from a single mill across the globe or source all product blanks from one location. Instead, we collaborate closely with our network of local suppliers to source materials and products that meet stringent, pre-defined specifications. This approach ensures that while materials may originate from different sources, they consistently match the required data points for global brand consistency. We prioritize finding equivalent materials and products within each region, ensuring that the final product adheres to brand standards regardless of origin.
Maintaining Control over Branded Products
Ciloo empowers brands to maintain complete control over their branded products, from cost management and quality assurance to proactive support and sustainability reporting.
Cost Control: The platform provides granular control over spending, allowing brands to set budgets, manage co-op funds, utilize vouchers for specific projects or teams, and determine who can order what, when, and in which quantities. Personalized approval flows ensure that orders are authorized before production begins, preventing overspending and helping maintain budgets.
Quality control: Our supplier network adheres to strict quality guidelines. Additionally, brands can request samples for larger production runs. Multi-layered control mechanisms ensure that every item bearing the brand name meets the highest standards.
Customer Support: Ciloo’s dedicated customer care team provides proactive support throughout the entire process. From onboarding and platform training to order management and issue resolution, our team is available to provide guidance and assistance. We proactively monitor orders, anticipate potential issues, and communicate regularly with brands to keep them informed of progress and address any concerns promptly.
Sustainability reporting: Thanks to strong supplier relationships and transparent communication, we can gather data on material sourcing, production processes, and transportation, covering the entire supply chain. This information allows brands to track their environmental footprint and report accordingly. Learn more about how Ciloo makes it easier for brands to gather information for their sustainability reports.
Empowering brands every step of the way
Ciloo empowers brands to confidently pursue local, on-demand production without sacrificing the integrity of their brand identity. We provide the tools, network, and support necessary to benefit from decentralized production, ensuring that every touchpoint reflects the brand’s core values and visual standards. With Ciloo, brands can achieve the perfect balance between local relevance and global consistency, optimizing both cost-effectiveness and brand impact.
Ciloo is at the forefront of an evolving production landscape. We believe the future lies in agile, on-demand models that prioritize sustainability, efficiency, and brand control. By connecting brands with a global network of vetted suppliers and providing a centralized platform for managing all aspects of product creation, production, and delivery, Ciloo is leading the way in transforming how brands create and distribute their branded materials.