Pantone Matched

Colour matching or “Pantone Matching” as it is sometimes called involves mixing inks into the plastic shell of the USB flash drives during the manufacturing process. The end results look stunning and the customer ends up with a truly unique USB flash drive.

Pantone matched USB flash drives typically carry a small price premium partly because of the additional effort to produce them and partly because of the extra material used to produce USB body shells in short production runs. The shell manufacturers minimum production run is 1,000 units so if you order says 250 USB drives they will discard the extra 750 shells (or hold them in stock if they think you might come back and order more)

To help you visualise what a colour matched USB flash drive printed with your logo on might look like ask your supplier to work up a number of different mock-ups for you to consider – any decent supplier should have in-house designers that can do this quickly and easily and its by far the best/cheapest way of deciding how to proceed.

Pantone-Matching

At USB2U we offer free pantone matching on USB flash drives. The only caveat is that we ask you to order at least 500 pieces to qualify for the free offer. If you don’t need this many then we do make a charge for pantone matching but it still won’t break the bank and typically adds just a few pennies to the cost per flash drive.

USB flash drives are currently one of the most popular promotional items in the market today so if you’re ordering them don’t settle for second best. Make sure you take the time to work with our designer to get the best colour for your brand. We’ll work up some examples and mock-ups free of charge and then we’ll produce the pantone matched sticks for you for no extra charge (min 500 pcs).

With the growing popularity of Branded USB Memory sticks, there are a number of providers springing up to support this. However, there is a hidden issue that any potential buyer needs to be aware of, that not all providers are that transparent with.

In essence there are 3 components to any Branded USB Memory sticks, the flash chip (the brains), the circuit board and the body of the USB Memory stick itself.

Whilst the circuit board and body are pretty standard across the industry, there is a wide variation of USB Flash chips. In summary these can be classified as follows:

Grade A: Original ‘branded’ USB flash chips

These flash chips are made by leading global brands such as Samsung, Hynix, Intel, Micro. They will print their name and unique series number on each chip.

These are tested to a high QA tolerance and come with a full warranty. They are the most reliable, but come at a premium price and are the most expensive USB Flash chips in the market.

Grade B: OEM flash chips

These USB flash chips are made from the main chip providers, but do not carry any branding or warranties. They are as reliable as the branded flash chips, but come at a discounted rate.

Grade C: Downgraded flash chips

There is a wastage of chips from the main manufactures, from a combination of the chip cutting process and QA failures. These are sold in bulk to third parties, who aim to recycle and sell on. There is a high failure rate on these USB Memory sticks, up to 40% in some instances. However the low price also reflects this.

Grade D: Masked chips

Finally we have fake / counterfeits USB Memory chips. This is when port quality chips are programmed to mask the real size of the memory. For example, a memory stick may show that it is 1Gb, but could actually be a 128Mb chip. The only way that a user would find out the problem exists is if they try to load data that is over the actual chip capacity. The prices offered are extremely low and reflect the cost of the actual chip set used.

So in summary, ensure the supplier informs you in writing what type of chip they are providing. If it is a mission critical or high profile project, it’s worth paying for Grade A branded chip. However, Grade B would suffice for most promotional campaigns.

One final point if the price for the USB Memory sticks sound too good to be true or out of sync with other quotes then there is a high probability of them being Grade C or D chips.

Next in the series- Tip 2 – The dangers of  loading data onto USB Memory sticks.