Print & Livery for Painters & Decorators
Your workwear is seen more than everything else you print combined
Count the hours each surface actually gets
A full interior decoration on a three-bed is £3,260. Exterior painting, £2,380. A kitchen refresh, £915. Wallpaper hanging, £445. A single room, £410.
Add up where your printed presence is actually seen over a year.
Your van: parked outside a house for eight days a job, on quiet residential streets, seen by a few dozen people a day. Your leaflets: read for three seconds and binned. Your cards: pocketed and lost.
Your workwear: worn for eight hours a day, three feet from the customer, in their house, while they make tea, walk past, work upstairs and decide whether to recommend you. Across a fortnight that is eighty hours of continuous close-range viewing by the person who is about to tell three neighbours what you were like.
No other trade on this site has that. A plumber is in and out. A roofer is on the roof. You are in the living room, all week, in whatever you happen to be wearing.
Which makes workwear — clean, branded, consistent, replaced when it gets past it — the highest-return printed item in your trade by a distance, and the one most decorators treat as an afterthought.
What that set should include
Embroidered polos, several. £12 to £18 each with setup around £25 to £40. Several, because one branded polo worn every day for two weeks stops signalling what it was meant to signal.
Branded whites or bibs. They will get covered in paint, which is expected and fine. What matters is that they started the week clean and identifiable.
A softshell or fleece for exterior work. £30 to £45, and it is what the customer sees in March.
Dust sheets and floor protection that look deliberate. Not printed as such, but part of the same purchase — matched, in good condition, laid before anything else happens. It is the first thing a customer judges and it is the physical form of everything the branding page promises.
Vehicle livery. Cut vinyl at £350 to £700 on a small van. Yours sits on a residential street for eight days at a time, which is far longer than most trades manage, so legibility at walking pace matters more than at speed.
A colour and finish leave-behind. A printed record of exactly what was used in each room — product, colour, finish, how many coats. It costs almost nothing, it is kept in a drawer for years, and it is the reason they ring you rather than somebody else when they want the hallway doing.
A card that survives a kitchen drawer. 400gsm, five hundred for £30 to £50.
The ratio
A full interior is £3,260. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One interior job covers five and a half years.
On workwear: a set of polos, bibs and a softshell is realistically £150 to £250 and lasts a couple of years. Decorating spreads down streets, and one job described well to neighbours routinely produces two more on the same road. The workwear is a meaningful part of how that description gets formed, and it is being seen for eighty hours a job either way.
What we’d actually produce
A full workwear set, specified for the seasons and for enough rotation that it stays clean.
A colour and finish record sheet, printed per job, which is the item most likely to produce the next booking.
Van livery for a slow-moving residential audience, where people read it walking past rather than at speed.
Cards and a small leave-behind for neighbours, because on a street where you are visible for a fortnight, somebody always asks.
A care standard document, printed, handed over at the start of every job.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Branded workwear on every job, in enough quantity that it is always presentable
- A printed colour record left behind at every completion
- A van that residents on the street can read while walking past
- Something to hand to the neighbour who asks, on every job
- Repeat bookings that reference the colour sheet from three years ago
The mistakes we see most
One polo. Worn every day for two weeks it stops looking like a uniform and starts looking like the only shirt.
Treating leaflets as the main spend. In this trade the workwear and the leave-behind outperform a leaflet drop comfortably.
No record of what was used. The customer wants the same colour in the next room two years later, cannot remember it, and rings whoever can tell them.
Tired dust sheets. They are the first physical thing the customer judges and they say more than any printed item you own.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. Workwear specified and ordered, because it starts working on the next job and takes the longest to arrive.
Weeks 5–8. The colour record sheet and the care standard, printed and in use.
Weeks 9–12. Van livery and cards, plus the neighbour leave-behind.
At ninety days the measure is whether the last five jobs were worked in branded, presentable kit and left a printed colour record behind. Both are small and both compound.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Job records hold the rooms, colours, products and finishes, so the printed colour record is generated from what was actually used rather than written out at the end of the week.
Because the same record persists, a customer coming back in five years is met with the exact specification rather than a guess.
And the care standard can be attached to the booking confirmation, so it goes out on every job rather than the ones you remember.
Exterior work is the fortnight you are actually on public view
Everything above is about being seen inside the house. Exterior work is the opposite situation and it deserves its own short list, because for one or two weeks a year you are the most visible thing on a street.
A three-bed exterior at £2,380 puts you on ladders or a tower at the front of a property, in full view of every passing car and every neighbour, for the better part of a fortnight. The house itself is transformed in a way that is visible from a hundred metres. Decorating spreads down roads more reliably than almost any trade, and exterior work is the mechanism.
So a small correx board in the front garden for the duration, at £15 to £25, is doing something no interior job can offer. So is a properly liveried van parked at the kerb all day rather than in a driveway.
The other item is timed and specific. A short leaflet through thirty or forty doors on the same road, while the scaffolding or the tower is still up, saying what is being done at number 18 and offering to look at anything similar while you are in the area. Neighbours with the same render, the same window frames and the same age of paintwork are the warmest audience you will get, and they are watching anyway.
Order the board and the leaflet template once, use them every exterior season, and the most visible fortnight of your year stops being anonymous.
Questions decorators ask
Is workwear really the priority? Eighty hours a job of close-range viewing by the person who decides whether to recommend you. Yes.
How many polos? Enough for a clean one every day of a working week, which is usually five.
Do leaflets work for decorating? Modestly, and considerably better when dropped on the street you are currently working on rather than across a town.
Is the colour sheet worth printing? It is the cheapest repeat-booking mechanism in your trade and almost nobody produces one.
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