With wedding season quickly approaching, many business owners are considering what personalization technology is the most profitable and practical for creating custom products to serve the wedding market.

Rustic Falls Engraving—better known as RF Engraving—sits at the center of town in Grantsville, Utah. About 30 miles west of Salt Lake City, Grantsville is home to 12,000 people. While RF Engraving has done work across the country and internationally, the majority of their business is closer to home, including from nearby Salt Lake City.

According to the Color Science Lab at North Carolina State University, “Colors are personal psychological experiences that can be generated from various kinds of stimuli, most commonly lights of a specific spectral composition. They are taken to represent a continuum, transitioning within it in various ways. Similar to all perceptual experiences, they are subjective and depend strongly on illumination, [surroundings] and a number of other perceptual phenomena.”

When DJ and Judi Brown started their business in 2006, they were a small operation that used a foil press to personalize small items like napkins, ribbons and cards. Bit by bit, their business—which was called Getting Personal Imprinting at the time—grew as they added services, such as applying photos to porcelain, mugs and other items.

Sublimation printing has been a popular method for printing designs onto several polyester or poly-coated substrates such as ceramic, metal and fabrics. A very important part of the sublimation process is adjusting the colors to make certain that the final product looks accurate according to the logos or designs you are working with. Here is a step-by-step process to help adjust colors for consistent and accurate sublimation.

As the year progresses, awards and personalization members face no shortage of challenges: supply chain delays, inflation, labor strains and more. In this climate, making the most of the equipment you already have isn’t just helpful—it’s vital. If costs rise elsewhere, after all, greater in-house efficiency can help pick up the slack.

Sublimation has been a revolutionary development for imprinting personalized products. Dye-sublimation printing originated in the 1950s, but has only become widely used in recent years as computers became standard equipment and technology costs decreased.

Among the many products JDS offers that are perfect for personalization, cutting boards have been an amazing option for customers to engrave and personalize for their own clients. The downside of many engravable products is that they usually are made only for that purpose and not for specific printing processes to add multiple colors—and although there are many options out there for this purpose, most of them are not cheap.

I’ve often wondered how it happens. How does a person or business become known for specializing in a particular product or service? Does the idea come from within, or the consumer? Is it random, or does it occur by a more organic nature? And the most important question: Can a decent living be made through a niche profession? As always, I think the answers are many and the road to a niche is a winding one.

Where’s the beef? It’s in this very beefy project that, among other things, will detail a process for creating table tents with call numbers on them like those used by many fast-food locations.

Large franchise operations order these by the millions at a super cheap price, but smaller, local establishments often require quantities that can be profitable for laser owners, UV printers, sublimators, and other smaller-run personalization professionals.