going to make a calendar

[microman23]

I am going to make a calendar for 2008.

I have a couple distributers that will be interested in this product.

What are some of the most popular subjects?

I was thinking:

animals
nature
girls

Do these seem popular? Anything else I should know before making a calendar?

[microman23]

Anyone?

[idofotos]

Anyone?

Im just completing one for a Radio station, we chose girls of Rock 101.5

summer is about over so if you live anywhere seasonal you might take that into consideration

[GotDesign01]

Any ideas for pricing a calendar project?

[Zvon]

** just realized this is a resurrected thread, gotdesign01 you can read in my post what we charged for our calendar**
Hey Microman,

I just made a calendar and we printed about 2500 of them. it was a pretty big project and it was not as easy as it seems (to do properly). our theme was girls in Croatian Folklore costumes to show our wonderful culture. With models it's difficult as you need locations, preferably seasonal ones, scheduling and you'll need at least 13 girls unless some repeat in months. I won't go into too much detail about that, but you get the idea. You also need to worry about weather if it is outdoors and such.

(you can view my online gallery to see some of the pics from the calendar, look for traditional croatian costumes http://photos.zvon.ca)

The next problem was cost. Calendars are not cheap if you want a high quality print, in fact any printing is not cheap :) for the 2500 calendars we payed almost $9000 CDN.
What we did as we were a non profit org, was used sponsorships from local businesses to cover the costs. This allowed us to sell the calendars at a profit.

The next step is designing the calendar in quark or whatever program you want, so hopefully that's not something you'll have to pay someone (I did it for our calendar and we saved design costs).

Selling the calendar went well although we found we had to market it in Nov-Jan otherwise the window for calendar sales was over. Not too many people go out and buy a 2008 calendar in June of 2008 or even Feb 2008 for that matter.

We sold our calendars for $15 until mid January then sold them at $10 after that just incase there were any other stragglers coming around to buy :)

Our sales went great, but we also had a niche market so results may vary for the general population. You say you have distributers so you may not need to worry about 80% of what i said, but I figured i'd put it out there if it was a project you were considering doing. Hope this helps :)

[microman23]

Zvon, nice to hear about you venture. Looks like you may have had a niche market.
How many calenders did you still have from sales?

[microman23]

Ohyeah... 09 is what I meant to say :p

[Zvon]

microman,

The numbers are still coming in as we had to ship the calendars across select cities across North America, although from my projections and what people are telling me about 1000-1300 were actually sold. I hope by the end of it we sell about 1500. that's $15,000 profit for our organization so it would be a huge success of a project for such a small org.

[microman23]

Very cool! What business did you donate to?

[Zvon]

ourselves :) It is a Croatian Folklore Group that performs cultural songs with our native instruments. The funds allow us to go to different cities to perform and such.

A great example of this is here : http://youtube.com/watch?v=LHca11ljdpw
A bunch of my buddy's playing in this video. Enjoy - the tempo goes very quickly near the mid point of the song :)