Get Ready for Spring Team Sports with Art Portal
05 January, 2022
Bottom Line Up Front: The middle of winter might not be your busiest season. But, you can prepare for the bustling team sports season next spring with Art Portal, a new tool in GraphicsFlow that lets customers send your shop design ideas and generate orders faster.
The holidays are now behind us and business may have slowed down, but you know that you always need to be thinking a few months ahead of time like any good printer. Specifically, we’re talking about spring sports. Whether that’s baseball, softball, lacrosse, tennis, track and field, or other warmer weather games, schools need their uniforms and spirit wear ready to go when the season kicks off. You probably already have a few schools on your customer list. Instead of waiting until after Groundhog Day to get the ball rolling with prepping their designs, why not start preparing today?
Well, we’ve got great news because with GraphicsFlow, there’s a brand new tool you can use to speed up the art creation and approval processes. And, you and your team will be ready to print before those baseball diamonds are cleaned off for the season. We’re talking about Art Portal, a new feature in GraphicsFlow that turns its massive catalog of 25,000-plus art designs public-facing.
What does that mean for you and your customers?
Now, what giant library shops have at their fingertips is something your customers can also use to come up with ideas for their lacrosse team, baseball team, or booster club. And there are no unique logins or confusing portals for your customers to navigate either. You can add Art Portal to your existing website with a premade embed code and simply copy and paste the code, and you’re ready to go.
You can also customize your Art Portal with a company logo, colors, header, and body text, so it’s got a unique touch that reflects your business’s branding.
No more licensing issues.
Inspired clients are great, but it’s always a headache when customers come to your shop with a design that features copyrighted images or logos. Even if it’s a design you can salvage and rework, so it’s legal for you to print, that’s labor hours you have to budget for your art department and, in turn, bill your customer.
With Art Portal, customers put together the design ideas with artwork you already have full access and rights to. Once you get that design request from a customer, you can easily download the file and finalize it into a complete art mockup for approval and send it back over to them.
Get your customers on board early.
Instead of sending your customers a typical reminder email asking them to start placing orders early for the season, now you’ve got a specific tool they can use. When you send out your monthly reminder emails to your customers, link directly to your art portal and let them know they can use this feature to send you ideas for their school’s teams. You can also add a mockup in your email with a few designs created with GraphicsFlow artwork to give your customers a better idea of what they can make with Art Portal.
And email isn’t the only outlet you can use to promote your Art Portal option. Add the link directly to your social pages so all those team sports customers can click directly from your Facebook and Twitter posts to start a design request.
Faster approval is ready for the spring.
If you’re already using GraphicsFlow, you know that one of the crucial features is that it enables you to send an art approval to a customer and speed that conversation up all online so you can move the order from ideation to printing. With Art Portal, that process is now even faster and easier.
Once you’ve received a design request from a customer and sent them an art approval, all the details are stored inside GraphicsFlow. So even if your local softball team doesn’t need their shirts until April, you can finalize the design for coaches, save that approval in GraphicsFlow, and simply file it for when it’s time to start printing up orders.
A way to stay ahead of the pack.
Team sports customers and all online shoppers, for that matter, want easy, seamless experiences for designing and ordering custom merch which is why some of the more prominent industrial names like CustomInk have so much success. With Art Portal, your customers have a simple, straightforward tool to submit artwork to you that doesn’t require any design skills or heavy tech knowledge.
The less work your customer has to do to reach a final design, the more likely they’ll do business with your shop and not the one down the road that’s endlessly sending file attachments back and forth. Best of all, the artwork available in Art Portal features plenty of trendy, retail-inspired designs that give your customers plenty of inspiration to keep coming back.
The GraphicsFlow Art Portal takes out the usual legwork of building artwork for team sports and puts you in control. With a simple embed code, you’ll reduce art creation costs, finalize approvals ahead of the spring schedule, retain your team sports customers, and grow your shop’s business since you’ll be able to add more team sports accounts to your list.
Ready to see how GraphicsFlow Art Portal will help you ace the team sports market in Spring 2022? Contact a Client Advisor today for a personalized 15-minute tour. Fifteen minutes can change your business.
Not ready? Test drive the art portal and submit a sample design. See for yourself the potential of Art Portal for your business.
