The Hotline Knowledge Centre

The Hotline Knowledge Centre brings our buying guides, product ideas, FAQs, case studies and site news together in one place on hotline.co.uk. It's there to help you work out what to order from a range of over 2,000 branded products, what it'll cost and how long it'll take, before you speak to anyone. Everything in it is free to read and you don't need an account. Hotline Promotional Products has been supplying branded merchandise to UK organisations since In that time we've answered the same questions thousands of times on the phone: what a sensible spend per person looks like, whether 50 units is enough to get a decent price, and how long a printed hoodie takes compared to a printed pen. The Knowledge Centre is where we're writing those answers down, so you can get them at nine o'clock on a Sunday evening without waiting for us to open on Monday.

What's in the Knowledge Centre

Guides explain how promotional product buying works. Budgets and quantity breaks, minimum order quantities, lead times, branding methods and the artwork you need to send. Start here if you're ordering for the first time, or if you've inherited a merchandise budget from someone who has left.

Ideas are product suggestions grouped by occasion and audience, for when you know the event but haven't settled on the item.

FAQs are short answers to single questions. Minimum orders, VAT, setup charges, file formats, turnaround times.

Case studies are real orders we've delivered, covering what was ordered, why that choice was made, and how it went on the day.

News covers changes to our range and our website. New products, new categories, and the features we build to make ordering less work.

Who the Knowledge Centre is written for

It's written for the person who has been handed a merchandise budget and a deadline, which in our experience is rarely someone whose job title mentions merchandise. That might be a marketing manager with an exhibition stand booked, an HR team building an onboarding kit, an events team planning delegate bags, or someone ordering branded pens for a small business for the first time.

You don't need to know the terminology. Where we use a term like MOQ or pad printing, we explain it the first time it appears and then use it normally.

We've also tried to be useful about the things suppliers usually go quiet on. Minimum order quantities vary from 5 units on some clothing to 100 on printed sweets. Dispatch times run from 5 working days on a screen printed tote bag to 22 on a full colour bamboo fan. Those numbers decide what you can realistically buy, and they belong in public rather than in a quote you have to ask for.

Where to start if you're new to branded merchandise

If you want to see your logo on something before you spend anything, read how a Visual Proof works. Proofs are free, they come back within 20 minutes and there's no obligation to order.

If you know your budget but not your product, read how to filter by budget, quantity and date. It covers working out your cost per head and narrowing 2,000 products down to what fits it.

If you have a fixed date to hit, read guaranteed delivery dates on promotional products. Every product page on our site shows the date we'll deliver on or before, and that article explains how to read it.

And if you want to check something is actually available before you plan around it, read how to see stock levels.

If you already know the kind of thing you're after, the News section also covers our Big Brands range for corporate gifting, branded sweets and food for events and direct mail, and promotional fans for outdoor summer campaigns. Or go straight to the full product range and browse by category.

What we're adding next

The Knowledge Centre will keep growing. We're adding guides in the order our customers ask for them, which means the things people ring up about most get written first. If there's a question you want answered and it isn't here yet, tell us. We'd rather write the answer once and publish it than give it out one phone call at a time.