Schools can be a dream client for a retailer, providing steady, repeat business season after season, year after year. From student athletes to standout teachers and faculty, schools regularly recognize achievements, creating ongoing demand for awards, apparel, and other customized products. Beyond the revenue potential, working with schools also keeps businesses engaged with their local communities.

Blending Trends and Tradition in School Awards

How Savvy Retailers Pair Classic Recognition with Modern Design to Build Lasting Relationships in Education

By Michael Clarke

(Originally printed in the March/April 2025 issue of Insights.)

Schools can be a dream client for a retailer, providing steady, repeat business season after season, year after year. From student athletes to standout teachers and faculty, schools regularly recognize achievements, creating ongoing demand for awards, apparel, and other customized products. Beyond the revenue potential, working with schools also keeps businesses engaged with their local communities.

 

In addition to traditional staff and sports awards, there’s a continued push for awards recognizing star students and club members, as well as functional awards that commend student groups for community service.

However, capitalizing on this revenue stream requires more than just slapping a basic plaque on a trophy or adding a student-group name to a crystal award. If a business wants a school as a client, they need to provide a seamless experience, from the quoting phase through the final product. Building a seamless experience requires staying up to date on popular industry products and staying informed about local schools—knowing their sports schedules, popular student organizations, and even key players in the administration.

Classic Products and Innovations

As the market continues to evolve, retailers are finding schools want products that balance tradition with trendy, modern details. Trophies, plaques, and medals are still classic staples, but the types of customization and technology are changing the face of the traditional awards lineup.

Plaques incorporating full-color logos and school colors are incredibly popular, according to Megan Raymond of Raymond’s Trophy & Awards, a family-run awards store in Bakersfield, California. The company offers a value line of plaques in various sizes featuring sublimated plates.

“The great part is that we can easily incorporate the full-color logo and school colors,” says Raymond. “They love that it’s a quick turnaround, and we love the ease of building these.”

Medals and trophies remain popular with schools for all types of sports and extracurriculars, whether that’s wrestling and football or mathletes and chess club.

“The focus lies in innovating these traditional items to keep them relevant and engaging,” says Jim Nother of Nothers The Award Store, which is based in London, Ontario. “We’ve introduced custom-shaped acrylic pieces and fidget-friendly components to give these timeless items a fresh appeal.”

Tapping Into Trends

Along with the continued call for more customizable features of classic products, businesses are receiving more interest in eco-friendly and sustainable goods. This can take some creativity on the seller’s part, but there have been a handful of interesting strategies to meet the demand.

“Some customers opt for glass instead of acrylic plastic as a more sustainable choice,” says Nother, adding that other buyers also prefer awards made from recycled materials.

In some cases, using existing materials can also be an option. Raymond says she’s seen a rise in customers asking the company to reuse old items.

“I think they hate the idea of the awards that didn’t get used or picked up just sitting in a storage room,” she says. “So in a sense, they are recycling and therefore being eco-friendly.”

Raymonds also lets schools bring back old medals from previous years to reuse. They remove the old engraving plate and replace it with a new one.

“They love that it is budget friendly and that we are not wasting product that was already purchased,” says Raymond.

There’s also been a slowly emerging trend of turning children’s artwork into long-lasting keepsakes through technology like sublimation. Raymond’s sublimates 6-by-8-inch white tiles for a local Boys & Girls Club. The tiles feature scanned art from children in the program. Eventually, the tiles are auctioned off for charity to support the Boys & Girls Club.

“Once other groups started to see this, it became a popular choice for schools and nonprofits as auction items,” says Raymond. “It’s definitely one of our growing-in-popularity items.”

Nother says he hasn’t seen as much demand for children’s artwork per se, but there’s been a growing interest in incorporating school photos into plaques.

“We offer full-color printing with professionally designed layouts created by our in-house graphics team, ensuring a polished and memorable presentation,” he says.

Retaining a School as a Customer

Even in the e-commerce and digital-communication age, maintaining in-person connections is still key to securing accounts, especially for retail businesses. Raymond urges meeting with school faculty to stay updated on key information.

“The athletic and activities directors have secretaries that are usually the points of contact. Get to know them,” she says. “Be sure to understand what the needs are, when events take place, so that [you] can help guide them during the school year.”

Nother says going the extra mile with schools and acting as a true partner will help build a longer-term relationship with those customers. That includes making strides to align with school budgets and offering school sponsorship opportunities.

“This genuine commitment to a long-term partnership resonates with schools, fostering trust and lasting relationships,” Nother says.

How products are presented in a final order is also key to building strong relationships with schools. Simple but effective methods like polishing plaques and packaging them in poly bags or packaging trophies back-to-back to keep plates from scuffing, Raymond says, can make a world of difference.

“Trophies are polished and boxed back-to-back, so the plates don’t touch,” says Raymond. “And when the plates have to face each other, we cut strips of old boxes to place in between them. Also, awards are boxed according to the parameters of the order. We want the customer to not have to search for each item; it’s important that everything is easy for the customer.”

Custom packaging—depending on the product type and customer order requests—can also help seal the deal for repeat orders. Nother says mementos and glass pieces often benefit greatly from custom packaging.

“For medals and similar items, we see potential value in investing in display structures, such as medal hangers, to enhance their visual impact and usability,” says Nother.

Balancing the Old and the New

Having a grasp on product trends is just part of the equation of doing business with schools, and the more retailers can research their local academic institutions, the better. This includes knowing local demographics and understanding what kinds of competitions happen in each season for team sports.

“These groups want an easy transaction, so if you can take the guesswork out of the process, they will choose to lean on you and your ability to be consistent and educated,” says Raymond. “Pay attention to the change in administration. Sometimes, if you haven’t been able to get in, this will be your foot in the door.”

Nother also recommends approaching each transaction with schools as a consultant and project manager instead of just a retailer. This collaborative mindset fosters loyalty and drives long-term success.

By staying current with trends in the personalization industry and maintaining consistent communication with school leaders, businesses can help establish a long-term customer relationship that nets a profit while building a strong reputation in the local community.

Classic Awards

While the demand grows for newer, innovative products, several classic awards remain popular thanks to their flexibility and versatility for all customers.

Perpetual plaques: The durability of these plaques is generally a strong selling point. Plus, additional plates can be added to a plaque based on need, like yearly recognition of a team, student, or faculty member at a school. This also makes perpetual plaques perfect for other customer categories, like sales teams, executive boards, and donor recognition.

Customizable trophies and medals: Trophy and medal designs continue to sell well for school sports teams, but with enhanced customization. For example, Nothers The Award Store incorporates custom-shaped acrylic pieces into trophies, ensuring each item matches the customer’s vision.

Sublimatable plaques: A popular decoration method for soft and hard goods, sublimating plaques work well for schools. Companies like Raymond’s Trophy & Awards offer a value-plaque series with simple, easy-to-understand pricing. “High schools typically do awards for varsity, junior varsity, and freshman/sophomore sports. So we named the 8-inch-by-10-inch plaque the Varsity, 7-inch-by-9-inch the JV, and the 6-inch-by-8-inch the FS,” says

Michael Clark is the content marketing manager for Inktavo, a family of software solutions that helps print shops, promotional- product distributors, and branded-merchandise businesses succeed. Over the past decade, he’s also contributed as an editor and columnist to several publications in the decorated-apparel, promotional-products, and signage industries.