What to consider when customising your lanyards

What to consider when customising your lanyards

Lanyards are essential for use in many different settings, including schools, hospitals, offices and at conferences and events.

The beauty of having lanyards is that they easily identify individuals and help to control access to a building as well as monitor security. But, what makes them really beneficial is that they can be conveniently customised to a particular situation or setting.

If you’re looking to get customised lanyards, there are lots of different factors you need to think about – and here are just some of them.

Function and purpose

Before you think about customising a lanyard, it’s important to consider what it will be used for, and by whom. What do you want to achieve from a lanyard?

Once you have the answers to these important questions, it will make customising your lanyard easier and more efficient.

Colours

Lanyards are available in a wide range of colours and styles, which you may wish to customise to suit your particular environment or setting. For example, if you need lanyards for a large organisation, you could choose different colours to represent different departments or job roles. In higher education settings, lanyards of different colours can be used to differentiate staff from students.

If you need lanyards for a particular event, such as a conference or a festival, customising them to incorporate different colours or styles could help to separate the delegates from attendees, or those who have paid the standard price against those who may have paid extra or have VIP access, for instance.

Many people also customise their lanyards using colours that fit in with a company’s logo, so that the lanyard forms part of a firm’s corporate identity. If you’re wearing a lanyard when out and about, and it gets seen by others with the company logo and colours on full view, this even works well as a form of marketing.

In fact, you don’t just have to have lanyards with colours on it; you can also customise them to include printed words or a logo, where you can choose different fonts or other features to suit a particular environment.

Materials and style

When customising your lanyards to suit your personal preference or situation, you’ll also need to think about what materials and style of lanyard you want. There are different options to choose from, including woven, nylon and custom moulded PVC, and more. Some materials offer great practical purposes, while others may look more stylish with a smooth, satin finish, so are ideal if representing your brand is important.

If you intend to wear your lanyard outdoors, then you might want to consider choosing a material that can cope with the outside elements. After all, the last thing you’ll want is to have the print run on the lanyard or be easily rubbed off if it got wet!

Lanyards that may be worn in very hot places might also need to be customised to cope with this kind of environment, for example, with the use of heat-resistant materials and plastic rather than metal fittings.

Another aspect you might wish to consider when customising your lanyards is how eco-friendly they are. It’s worth noting that some lanyards are now made from recycled materials, so if looking after the environment is a priority for you, this could be an option to consider.

Of course, when it comes to deciding upon different materials and other features you might want to include when customising your lanyards, ultimately, how much you’ve got to spend may dictate what you can, and can’t, choose.

However, if the lanyards are likely to get a lot of use, and may be re-used by lots of different people, it’s always worth choosing the highest quality options you can afford, to ensure longevity.

Size dimensions

When customising your lanyards, you can also choose from a range of different sizes. Again, it’s important to think about the purpose of the lanyard when working out the dimensions you need.

If you intend to include a logo or wording on your lanyard, so it can be used to easily identify an organisation or department, or as a marketing tool, then you might wish to choose a lanyard that has wide dimensions so the printing can be easily seen. If the lanyard is used more for functional purposes, such as accessing a building, then a narrower size may suffice.

Think about length, too. If the lanyard will be used with an access card that needs to be frequently swiped in doors, it may be easier to choose a longer length so that the wearer doesn’t need to keep taking it off every time they enter a building. Shorter lengths may be better suited to those lanyards that are just used with ID cards.