The Buy Me Blog has this great post about a contest by The Gallery Collection allowing high school and college artists to submit their work as a possible design for the greeting cards sold on the company's site.

Buy Me Blog then muses about how great it would be to send out christmas cards with a young artist's work on the front.

But what about sending out other personalized stuff created by your own kids and family to promote your business?

Frankly, with services like CafePress.com and Zazzle making it easier and cheaper every day to create personalized stuff for promotional or any other purpose, I'm amazed more businesses don't use this as a major part of their bootstrap marketing.

I suspect there are several reasons for this:
• They fear personalized items will not look professional and will not convey the proper image about their business
• They think the process of making personalized promotional material will be too involved and time consuming taking time away from their central business
• They believe personalized products, say, a family portrait or a really cool drawing by your ten year old, will make the company appear too small and insubstantial and fear it's best to promote a more generic big time corporate image

I think all of these reasons are pretty wrong headed especially considering the services available today and the possible benefits of taking advantage of this simple and inexpensive form of bootstrap low cost marketing.

• Far from unprofessional, for small businesses personalized items, if tastefully done, can create a connection between you and a regular customer increasing the good will and the feeling that they are doing business with someone they know and trust.
• It takes almost no time to create many of the promotional items on CafePress.com and other similar sites. I created the T-shirt above in about 10 minutes using the CafePress system.
• Check out what blogger and entrepreneur Pelle Braendgaard has to say about being proud of your small venture and don't be intimidated into trying to pretend you're bigger than you are.

Here's more about choosing your print on demand service from Squidoo.