Your Logo Changed: What Happens to the Branded Merchandise You Already Have?

When your company changes its logo, everything branded you are already holding goes out of date on the same morning — and the honest answer is that almost none of it converts. A screen print cannot be unprinted and embroidery cannot be unpicked at any sensible cost, so a rebrand is never a reprint job. It is a fresh production run against a new design, with all the same steps as the first one. What you can actually control is how much stock is sitting in the store cupboard when the announcement lands, which items genuinely have to change on day one, and how long the gap runs. It helps to know the clock you are working against: on corporate merchandise OfficeSmart quotes a 100-unit MOQ per design on most items, mockups in 48 hours, a sample in 5 days and bulk in 10 days from artwork approval. A new logo resets every one of those, because a changed design is a new design. Here is how to triage what you are holding, and how to run the changeover once rather than three times.

Which branded items actually stop being usable?

Far fewer than the all-staff email implies. The useful question is not whether an item carries the old mark but who sees it, so sort the cupboard by audience before you sort it by item.

• Anything that goes to a customer, an investor or a conference audience changes first. A booth backdrop, the tote at a Bengaluru tech meetup and the notebook left on a client's desk are the brand, and an old mark on them reads as a company that has not finished the job.
• Apparel worn at company events is second. Two logos in one group photo is the single most visible way a rebrand looks half-done, and that photo outlives the stock.
• Items an employee already owns are not yours to retire. A bottle somebody has carried for a year is their bottle. Replace it when you have a reason to hand out bottles again, not by collecting the old ones.
• Desk-level consumables — pens, mouse pads, notepads, lanyards — can usually run down to zero. Nobody outside the floor sees them and the cost of binning a working box is real.

Can the old logo be covered, removed or reprinted over?

Treat the answer as no and you will be right nearly every time. Each decoration method fails differently, and none of them fails cheaply. Screen print is ink bonded into the fabric; printing over it leaves a visible ghost under the new mark. Embroidery can technically be unpicked, but the needle holes stay and the labour per piece costs more than the garment. DTG sits in the fibre the same way screen print does. Heat transfer is the one occasional exception — a transfer can sometimes be lifted and re-applied — but it is a per-piece hand operation, so it only makes sense on a small number of expensive items.

The patch-over-the-old-logo idea comes up in every one of these conversations. It works on a jacket and looks like a repair on a polo. Ask for a physical sample of the patched result before committing a quantity to it, because a photograph will not tell you how it sits after a wash.

Does the MOQ apply again when only the logo has changed?

Yes, and this catches people who assume a rebrand is a variation on an existing order. The minimum is a production-economics floor, not a new-customer formality: a new screen, a new embroidery file and a new setup cost the same whether they run 80 pieces or 800. On most merchandise items that floor is 100 units per design. Premium items such as jackets and backpacks come down to 50. Below 50 units the realistic answer is open-market sourcing at slightly higher unit prices, which during a rebrand means what arrives may not be the branded piece you were trying to standardise on in the first place.

The planning consequence is to resist replacing everything at 30 units a time. A rebrand multiplies designs — a t-shirt, a polo, a bottle and a notebook is four designs, each with its own floor — so decide which items genuinely need to exist in the new identity before the quantities are set, rather than reproducing the old catalogue item for item.

What does your supplier need before the new design can run?

A rebrand has a specific failure mode here. The new identity usually exists as a slide in a launch deck and nowhere else, while the print-ready files sit with the design studio that built it. Production needs vector artwork, the Pantone codes, and a one-colour version for embroidery and single-colour printing. Ask the studio for the brand kit folder rather than for the logo, and ask before the launch date is announced instead of after.

Put one named person in charge of issuing those files. The predictable mess of a rebrand is not the old stock, it is three teams ordering from three slightly different exports of the new mark over the following six months, which leaves you with a second inconsistency to fix.

How long does a full merchandise refresh take in Bangalore?

Work on the standard clock and work backwards from the launch, not forwards from today. Mockups come back in 48 hours, a sample in 5 days and bulk in 10 days from artwork approval. The fastest we have produced is 6 days, on an emergency conference order, and rush work carries a 10-15% surcharge — so speed is buyable, but it is not something to plan a rebrand around. Add delivery on top: same-day across Bangalore, 2 days to other metros, 3-4 days to Tier-2 cities and 5-7 days to remote pincodes if kits are going to employees at home rather than to the office.

In practice that means artwork has to be final roughly three weeks before anyone stands in front of a banner with the new mark on it, and the sample round has to survive a round of senior opinions inside that window. Teams split across Whitefield, Koramangala and Electronic City should also decide whether all three sites change on the same day or in sequence, because a staggered rollout is cheaper and a simultaneous one photographs better.

What do you do in the gap before new stock lands?

Something, deliberately, rather than nothing by accident. Unbranded stock is the usual bridge: a plain tote or a neutral notebook carries no wrong mark, and for a few weeks that is better than either option with a logo on it. For an event inside the gap, spend the budget on the backdrop, the signage and the digital assets, which change overnight and are what the photographs actually show, and keep the giveaway plain. For new joiners, a kit that arrives late in the correct identity beats one that arrives on time in the old one.

What should you settle with your supplier before the changeover?

1. What happens to the balance of old-logo stock. Whether a supplier will take it back, hold it, or help dispose of it is not a standard term — get the answer in writing rather than assuming one.
2. Who holds the retired artwork and for how long. You will want the old files later for a replacement run on something nobody got around to replacing.
3. Whether the first run in the new identity can be split across two deliveries, so the event date is covered without committing the full quantity before the design has been seen in the wild.
4. How the order is invoiced if it ships to several offices — a consolidated GST invoice is simpler to reconcile than one per site.
5. A written note of the quantity, size curve and specification you are retiring, so the new run is sized from evidence instead of from the number somebody ordered two years ago.

The last one is the quiet win. A rebrand is the only moment when a company looks honestly at everything it has ever ordered, and most of that audit is useful well beyond the logo. If three of the eight items in the old kit never left the cupboard, the new kit is five items and the budget goes further on each of them. Replace the identity, and take the opportunity to replace the guesswork with it.