Engraving on promotional gifts

Business gifts buyers often ask for engraving  when they mean etching…and they are not alone in not quite knowing the difference.

Hand engraving has almost no place in personalising promotional items; it’s slow, laborious and expensive and no match for laser engraving. Laser engraving can accomplish complex and intricate designs speedily, accurately and comparatively inexpensively on most corporate merchandise.

However, many business gifts that appear to be engraved are not engraved at all and sometimes even the experienced eye is initially misled. Some business gifts of glass and crystal that are sold as engraved are actually personalised by using a stencil and sand-blasting the design into the glass or crystal. Nothing inherently wrong in this providing the customer is aware that they are paying for sand-blasting and not engraving.

The sand-blasting method of engraving is suitable for most glass and crystal and is often used to personalise paperweights with either a logo and strap line or sometimes a personal name as well.

The engraved images can be filled with various colours to produce a most pleasing effect. However, be aware that this method is only suitable for spot colours and is not possible for full colour work. Should full colour personalisation, such as a coat-of-arms or club shield, be required on glass or crystal  a transfer print is the only economic answer although sometimes hand painting is possible if the quantity is small.

Other promotional and recognition products that benefit from laser engraving are identity badges, name badges, conference badges, promotional coasters, advertising coasters, award plaques, glass paperweights, crystal paperweights and desk name plates. Aluminium promotional coasters are especially attractive when laser engraved as the base metal shows through the top coating and creates a quite unique effect. Similarly, identity badges, name badges, conference badges are quite spectacular when having a coloured background with the base metal colour left unfilled.

You can check out some of the other personalisation methods by navigating to them from the navigation panel to the left of the screen after you have looked at Engraving.