Most suppliers use “branded magnets” and “promotional magnets” interchangeably. They're not the same brief, and treating them as identical is how orders go wrong: either the colour comes back slightly off from what a franchise needs, or a QR-coded campaign magnet takes three weeks to arrive for an event that starts in ten days.
Here's the practical difference, including what changes in the file you send us and how the order gets prioritised.
Branded magnets: precision over creativity
A branded magnet's job is to reproduce your logo and colours identically, batch after batch, indefinitely. There's no campaign end date. The brief is short but has to be exact:
- Logo file: vector format (AI, EPS, or a PDF with fonts outlined), not a low-res PNG pulled off your website
- Colour reference: a Pantone (PMS) number or exact hex/CMYK values, not a description like "our blue." Screen colours and print colours don't match automatically, and "our blue" gets interpreted differently by every printer you ever use
- Bleed: if the shape is anything other than a simple rectangle, we need at least 2mm of bleed around the design edge so the die-cut line doesn't clip your logo
Worked example: a franchise with 12 branches orders 500 branded fridge magnets per location, four times a year, as part of an ongoing supply arrangement. The colour has to match exactly across all 48 orders spread over multiple years, including any orders placed by a different branch manager who's never spoken to the first one. This only works if the Pantone reference is logged against the account the first time, not re-eyeballed from a previous magnet each time.
Promotional magnets: speed over permanence
A promotional magnet exists to do a job inside a fixed window: a trade show, a launch, a seasonal offer. The design almost always carries more than a static logo, commonly a call to action, a QR code, an offer code, or a date. Once the campaign ends, the magnet's job is done, whether or not it gets thrown away.
Two things matter more here than for branded work:
Turnaround, not colour tolerance. A promotional magnet arriving after the event it was made for is a wasted order regardless of how accurate the print was. If you're ordering for a fixed date, tell your supplier that date first, before you finalise the design.
A live element that needs planning, not an afterthought. A QR code added at the last minute often gets sized too small to scan reliably, or points to a generic homepage instead of a page built for the campaign. Decide the QR destination and the offer code before you brief the design, not after.
Worked example: an agency orders 1,000 magnets for a 3-day trade show 12 days out. Turnaround is now the entire brief. UK manufacturing on a 1-week turnaround leaves roughly 5 days of margin for shipping and any last-minute proof correction, which is workable; ordering the same job with a 3-4 week lead time supplier would already have missed the show before production even started.
Where the two overlap
Most real orders sit somewhere between the two. A magnet for a product launch (promotional, time-bound) will usually still need the logo colour-accurate (branded, precision-bound). When that's the case, tell us which pressure matters more for this specific order, exact colour matching or a hard delivery date, because that's what determines how the job gets prioritised on the production floor if the two ever come into tension.
A five-question check before you brief the order
- Does this need to look identical to the last batch you ordered, or is this a one-off design?
- Is there a hard delivery date tied to an event, or is delivery flexible within the normal 1-week turnaround?
- Do you have a locked Pantone/hex reference, or just a logo file with no colour spec?
- Is there a QR code, offer code, or date on the design, and if so, where does it point?
- Will you reorder this exact design again, or does it expire with the campaign?
If the answers to 1 and 5 are "yes, identical" and "yes, reordered," you're briefing a branded magnet. If 2 and 4 are the ones with real weight, you're briefing a promotional one. Say which it is when you order, it changes what we check before the job goes to print.
Pricing works the same way for both
Whether it's branded or promotional, the same quantity-based pricing table applies: unit cost drops as order size increases. What differs is how people tend to order. Branded runs are usually mid-size (250 to 1,000) and repeated on a schedule. Promotional runs are more often sized to a single event, sometimes a small trial batch to test a campaign, sometimes a large single order to cover an entire show. We've broken down exactly how that quantity discount works, with real worked numbers, in our bulk pricing guide.
Getting it made
Every custom magnet is manufactured in the UK, with a 1-week turnaround and free UK delivery on all orders. You'll get a digital proof to approve before anything goes into production, whether you're locking in a brand colour for the next two years or racing a trade show deadline.