The Umbrella Workshop produces and distributes tailor-made umbrellas all over the world, so we’re busy all year round as you can always guarantee its rainy season somewhere! That said, as specialists in umbrellas of various shapes, sizes and colours, it was only a matter of time before printed parasols became part of our range as well… Come rain or shine, you can count on The Umbrella Workshop to protect your customers and even your products themselves from the elements in style!
Our custom-made parasols – case study
We’ve made stunning promotional parasols for the likes of Marshfield Ice Cream. They asked us to produce a design to complement their distinctive black and white cow print colour scheme. So where there’s ice-cream to be sold, our printed parasols will be working hard to attract the attention of passers-by, while protecting the sellers and their wares from melting in the heat. Multi-tasking is what they do best.
Our promotional parasols are built to last and available in a range of designs. From traditional garden style parasols to large square canopy parasols, we have a range of parasol styles and frames with easy opening and closing and different base options. Promotional parasols provide a cost-effective way of promoting your brand.
Get in touch for a quick quote!
The Umbrella Workshop offers a vast number of umbrellas for branding, including various options manufactured here in Britain.
- Do you need branded umbrellas printed quickly?
- Is British manufacture an essential part of your brand?
- Simply want to save on shipping?
This is the option for you…
The Umbrella Workshop can create both golf sport and city walking style umbrellas customised with your own eye catching design. Take a look around our printed umbrella gallery for some examples of what we can do.
We’ve produced high quality umbrellas just like these for clients including the British Embassy. Our own Umbrella Workshop branded umbrellas are also printed and manufactured in Britain!
Manufacturing in Britain has many advantages, depending on your product spec, with the potential to reduce both turnaround time and shipping costs, as well as helping to protect jobs in the UK and create new ones.
- Quick turnaround, promotional items produced and delivered asap
- Ideal for urgent orders
- Perfect for simple design specs
- Keeps shipping costs to a minimum
British Embassy umbrellas
- Manufactured in Sheffield
- Printed on pongee (high quality polyester used for canopy of the umbrella) then sewn together for best result
- Feature an unusual and distinctive red shaft, point and handle
Turnaround time
Urgent order to place? Contact us now with your specifications and we can advise you on the design options available. All our umbrellas come with a two year guarantee as standard.
Visit our sister site The Bag Workshop for information on creating promotional bags and Wurlin for details of other printed promotional items available.
Montreal born artist, filmmaker and essayist focuses on the impact of technology on the contemporary consciousness and how it distances us from ourselves. His work has gained much attention with his exhibitions of images found on Google Street View.
Evocative and thought-provoking, Jon Rafman’s work encourages us to evaluate what it means to be human and how our digital age is now defining us as humans and revealing the origins of loneliness and alienation in our modern society. He says “While celebrating and critiquing modern experience, the technological tools themselves show how they can estrange us from ourselves.”
Jon Rafman has received praise from publications that include The Guardian, Time Out and The Art Newspaper. His first major solo exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection’s London gallery closes next week and we are pleased to have manufactured an outstanding umbrella featuring his work. Unusual and eye-catching this umbrella is a double canopy walking umbrella. With a two year guarantee for quality and has been storm proof tested against gusts of 40mph.
The print detail is precise and if you look closely at the design you will see that what appears to be cuddly toys, are real people dressed up. If you look hard enough you’ll find the Stig.
Other work we’ve done for artists on umbrellas, include photographer Clive Sawyer and a beautiful oil painting for a museum of a Caillebotte oil painting. The level of detail is so well interpreted that it is hard to believe it is printed on pongee – a high quality polyester that we use for our umbrella canopies.
Museum umbrellas, artist umbrellas and illustrators choose to print umbrellas with their work because they are great gifts and a great way to bring revenue into a small business. The end user likes to buy an umbrella because they are useful but also because they are great gifts. Unusual prints on umbrellas are exciting and can add a sense of style and individuality.
PMS, Pantone Matching System – the universal matching system that allows printers, designers and manufacturers to perfectly match colours on any fabric or material.
We make cups of coffee and ask what PMS our colleagues are looking for. Some like it with milk and for non-milk drinkers, a Pantone reference helps us determine how much milk to include.
Do you look out the window and try to Pantone match the leaves on the trees or the sky?
We at the Umbrella Workshop, love colour
We live and breathe it each day. We have our favourite colours, our troublesome colours and colours we think should not come out to play.
PANTONE is the absolute resource for designers , clients and printers and manufacturers to speak in the same language of colour.
As the Inuit tribes of the north pole have 200 different names for snow, so we have for colour.
“I would like a sky blue umbrella please”
Take a blue for example, clients often ask for a sky blue umbrella canopy. When we look out the window from our offices in BATH, usually the sky is far from blue, its kind of bluey grey, with a Turner-esqe touch of red… this isn’t very helpful is it… so that where the people of PANTONE come in. They categorise colours to a ref. such as 2975C Sky Blue.
Woohee – this is great, well sort of. Colour changes depending on the situation.
Things that affect colour
- Ambient light source, where is the light coming from.
- Type of lighting e.g. sun light / office lights.
- Substate of material. PANTONE use both Coat (C) and Uncoated (U) References when describing colour, as colour subtly changes.
- Transparency of the material.
Tools for selecting colour or color as our American brethren say.
Pantone have a number of great tools from transferring colour from.
The obvious one is the Pantone books, quite expensive is you only occasionally use colour, and the full set will set you back .
A full set of Pantone guides will set you back £450 ($700). You can buy PANTONE books second hand through sources such as Ebay and Amazon. But be aware that colours do fade on the books and they get pretty battered when being used at a printers or a studio.
Colour and Pantone on the IPhone and IOS
There are a number of great tools which allows the easy match of colours from different Pantone books such as form C to U or vise versa.
You can get this get access to this at the PANTONE mothership: https://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/color_xref.aspx
The Beauty of C
The original intention of this post was to explain that we only work in Pantone Coated references.
So when you want an umbrella to be Pantone Matched , please let us know the closest Pantone Coated reference, often referred to PMS C.
Our free Pantone chart
Use our free pantone chart to find the colour reference you require. We use the Pantone Solid Coated references when reproducing a colour. The Free Pantone Chart is only suggested as a guide and we would recommend using official Pantone Colour swatches to make accurate choices of colour. Colours will vary depending on the configuration and accuracy of your Computer screen to reproduce colours.
Pantone Numbers are often referred to as PMS (Pantone Matching system), and designated a number as reference, and a corresponding number, to represent the Pantone Range, such as C for Coated, and U for uncoated. Colours vary in their coated and Uncoated forms, and are not interchangeable.
Download our Pantone Colour Chart
Please see the official Pantone Website for more details on the Pantone Matching system.
Silk screen colour chart
We Don’t do Grey we do 47 shades of it.
We have a number of Stock colours available within our bespoke range for delivery in 2 to 3 weeks. This material has be manufactured to strict colour tolerance and is a cost effective way of manufacturing your umbrella.
We can mix and match colours for your umbrella creating truly wonderful umbrella designs. Colours can be used both on external and internal Panels.
Don’t forget your not restricted to our stock colours and we can pantone our umbrellas from as little as 50 pieces.
Download our Silk Screen Stock Colour Chart
Corporate colour range
Our Corporate colour range of Umbrellas come as ready made umbrellas in comprehensive range of colours. These umbrellas are already manufactured and printing is restricted to an A4 print area on each panel.
Our colour chart provides detailed comparison of colours to the Pantone Matching system. Use the colour charts to match up your company’s branding.
Download our Corporate Colours Stock Colour Chart
Umbrella Fabric Swatch Colours from Far East Factory Production
In our far east factories we have access to a wide range of 190T Umbrella fabric colours.
Our colour chart provides detailed comparison of colours to the Pantone Matching system.
When we manufacture our umbrellas in the Far East, we can Logo print Umbrellas edge to edge.
You can find reference to our Pantone Color chart here.
Use the colour charts to match up your company’s branding.
Download our Far East Stock Colour Chart
Nyetimber commissioned us to produce a complimentary portfolio of branded merchandise that included a premium walking umbrella, USBs and pens.
As an established, high-end vineyard, their merchandise was also required to be of a high standard. Renowned for their quality – their chief wine maker, Cherie Spriggs made a stir in 2012 in the drinks industry due to her insistence on high-standards.
‘Over in West Sussex, Cherie Spriggs caused a stir this year when she declared she would not be bottling a 2012 vintage at her English sparkling estate Nyetimber, as the quality of her grapes was not up to her high standard.’ – Lucy Shaw, The Drinks Business, 21 December 2012.
With their standards in mind, we created a quality set of branded merchandise to suit their brand values. A quality portfolio of bespoke branded promotional merchandise that consisted of a wooden branded USB, wooden branded pen and stunning customised promotional umbrella with double canopy which gives it a luxury feel.
Promotional umbrella design options for a luxury gift
Other promotional umbrella finishes that can create a luxury product or client gift, include engraved handles, woven labels, printed tie wraps or Pantone matched perimeter tape.
Other great brands we have worked for include Gordon Ramsey’s Maze restaurant, The Savoy, Liz Earle, le Gavroche, Disney and Adidas.
Why use a promotional umbrella to promote your brand?
Repeated brand exposure each time it rains
A great client gift: it’s useful, quality reminder about your service or product. Practical gifts are welcome and appreciated
There are striking images coming from Hong Kong of protesters using umbrellas as a symbol for pro-democracy which are moving and emotive. Protesters have been using umbrellas to protect them from tear gas and are using them to mark territory they are occupying.
We’re wishing our colleagues and associates a safe and democratic outcome.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/hong-kongs-umbrella-revolution/
Acclaimed sculptor, Anish Kapoor, famed for his huge-scaled sculptures designed to unsettle the viewer and twist their surroundings, is exploring the possibilities of working with the world’s darkest, blackest material, Vantablack. We heard this exciting news this morning and read it in Dazed.
Following a two year development, Great Britain made a breakthrough with the world’s darkest material. This super-black material called Vantablack, developed by Surrey NanoSystems, reaches new levels of sensitivity and performance to create a black hole effect which comprises a forest of vertical tubes so when light hits Vantablack, instead of bouncing off it, it becomes trapped and deflected between the tubes before becoming heat.
So, maybe one day we’ll be able to create a Vantablack umbrella. Wow!
In the meantime, we can make you a black umbrella. In a number of blacks. The full Pantone range of blacks. Pongee black. Polyester black. Matt black. Shiny black. Black frames. Black handles.
You can find our more about Anish Kapoor’s work here.
We use a rather fun horse head to model our umbrellas. We’re not the only ones who like Neddy to help them out.
We’ve enjoyed this story of someone wearing a horse head to meet American president Barrack Obama.
Using Neddy helps us make our imagery concentrate on the beauty of the umbrella, rather than the model. We also like a giggle.
Take a look at this news story from the BBC about Scottish horse boy, this really made us laugh.
More Horse related stories here
We work within a variety of industries to provide different umbrellas for a number of purposes. That can include giving umbrellas as gifts to clients, using in an appropriate situation as well as a visual promotion.
Property developers and estate agents are among some of our more regular clients. An umbrella is often required when managing and conducting viewings for prospective buyers. It provides a great space to promote your brand as well as protect the user from the rain between property viewings.
It offers a number of subtle nuances which provide an assumption about the quality of service you offer, without you having to spell it out through a thoughtfully produced umbrella.
Use of clever or dramatic artwork can set you apart from your competitors. We’ve produced some beautiful work for clients recently. The Parisian and London skylines on umbrella panels as illustrated below, are fine examples of how striking an umbrella can look.
A powerful piece for Rathbone Place, used a map of London on the internal canopy which was carefully hand-crafted to match the artwork perfectly. The finishing on this umbrella also included a label on an external panel plus a Pantone-matched button on the tie wrap. Other options to consider when thinking about a super-looking premium umbrella are an engraved handle or bespoke carry case.
