FlagAndMap Weblog

The range of FlagAndMap Bumper Stickers has recently been expanded, offering a choice of designs with which to promote your favorite nation or support your national team during upcoming international sports competitions. All designs incorporate the popular motifs found on most of our products, namely authentic national flags or decorative flag hearts plus relief maps of the country.

Bumper stickers use durable water resistant 4mil vinyl and are fade resistant. As ever there are no minimum quantities and your order will be shipped in 24hrs. Here are some design examples:

Prices on our 2010 calendar mousepads have now been reduced. Designs on these durable and stylish mousepads incorporate a map of the selected nation plus a flag trim surrounded by the 2010 western calendar – available for over 180 nations.

Two new designs of customizable mug have been added to our European collection. These are template products, which make it easy to substitute your own text for the placeholder text. Substitute the name of a person or organization plus a special message or anniversary details to create a personalized gift or commemorative item.

The first design features a flag-colored map on one side with your text on the other side while the second features a map of flag hearts on one side with your text on the other side.

Recently we created bumper stickers with flag and map designs for every European nation. Each carries the country name in english plus the text ‘adventure destination’. As ever, you have the option to replace that text with your own before you buy.

As an example here is the bumper sticker for Romania

Want to keep track of what’s new at FlagAndMap? You’ve come to the right place! Stay informed about new products, current promotions and website enhancements. Be sure to use the ‘Latest News’ RSS feed for effortless monitoring of this information.

The ideas outlined in this post are prompted by commonly heard question these days: “How is your business weathering the current economic downturn?”. The first thing to state definitively is that FlagAndMap is not in danger of going out of business. FlagAndMap is still in an early development stage where growth is more important than profitability and modest long term investment ensures that the business does not encounter cash flow problems. For us the question is really about the impact of the current economic conditions on our rate of growth.

In fact, we have seen growth remain steady over the last six months, when correcting for year-end seasonal effects. Our stretch goal is for the number of customers and our revenue to grow by 50% year on year. In broad terms we are still achieving this despite the economic gloom.

In fact for an enterprise like ours it would probably be a mistake to use a recession as an excuse to relax growth goals. Companies in an early stage of growth are either riding the wave of an emerging market or, like us, trying to break into an established market by capturing market share. In the latter case unless the market has been catastrophically affected by the downturn (think car industry) the growth of a newer company based on market share capture should not be severely hampered. It may even be helped. Established players may be suffering – cutting costs to remain profitable, shedding resources due to overcapacity and struggling with cash flow issues. Newer ventures on the other hand may have none of these challenges – they are not currently expecting to be profitable, capacity has probably always lagged demand and long term investment for growth ensures that cash is on hand.

Of course FlagAndMap is a modest enterprise in comparison with some but the above considerations should be equally valid. We are therefore not intending to use the current recession as an excuse to relax our goals. Fortunately, so far this year we are not failing to achieve them and who knows, perhaps as the economy emerges from recession we may enjoy an unplanned boost.

Finally the website has a voice!  We’ve been selling products for some years now and the website (www.flagandmap.com/) has steadily been gaining functionality but it required a little extra learning to create a blog design that matched the appearance of the website*.  We hope you approve and will visit now and again to see what we have to say and add your thoughts too.

Blog topics will include development of a small internet based business, news updates on the FlagAndMap business and occasional observations on our global marketplace.

* Thanks to WordPress (www.wordpress.org) whose excellent open source software makes this customized blog design possible.