The UK Calendar Industry Awards, to become known as The Calies, are to make their debut this year. These significant new awards will recognise excellence in the calendar, advent calendar and diaries sector, including retail, charity and corporate titles.
Being launched by Max Publishing, owners of Progressive Greetings, with the support from the calendar and diary sector, the winners of The Calies will be unveiled at a memorable afternoon awards event to be held on Wednesday 29 November 2017 at the historic Stationers Hall, in the City of London.
The Calies are the successors to the National Calendar Awards (NCA), which have been running for the last decade (which in turn were a progression from the National Business Calendar Awards which initially only recognised business calendars).
“The calendar and diaries sector has been close to our hearts for many, many years through Progressive Greetings and Progressive Calendars. We were delighted to be given the opportunity and support from calendar publishers large and small to build on the success of the NCA with The Calies,” commented Warren Lomax, joint managing director of Max Publishing, which also owns and organises The Retas and The Henries awards in the greeting card sector as well as other leading awards programmes. “We are looking forward to combining our experience of organising leading awards with the important input from calendar experts, on the retailing and publishing sides.”
Danilo’s operations director Daniel Prince paid tribute to the former organsers of the NCAs – Pat Batley and Kay Hurrell – who are now “taking a well earned rest” having run the awards for the last decade, but also welcomed the opportunity to launch a fine-tuned, reinvigorated awards programme in The Calies.
“The calendar market is still a very vibrant sector – over 16 million calendars are sold alone every year in UK, with one in three homes having a calendar on their walls – that continues to prosper. There are over 40 different calendar publishers in UK market, let alone those who produce diaries and advents. This new event will provide a great opportunity for the industry to join together and celebrate the coming year’s calendars.”
The Calies will build on the heritage of the NCAs with the new timing of the event moving to end of November (the NCA’s used to take place in January) will allow winners and finalists to maximise the marketing potential of the awards in both trade and consumer press following the event, while the judging process will also be significantly expanded to have more retailer involvement.
David Pike, managing director of Calendar Club and Carousel added his endorsement of The Calies. “We are pleased to see the Calendar Awards being re-vitalised and broadened, in terms of both the publishers and the retailers taking part,” David said. “We are also excited that the rejuvenation of the awards represents an opportunity to promote calendars as a product to retailers and the end-customer.”
The website for The Calies will go live in a few weeks from which downloadable entry forms for all categories encompassing both retail and corporate titles, advent calendars and diaries
The awards will be free to enter to enable companies of all sizes to participate. The retail entries will be judged by a panel of knowledgeable retail buyers while the corporate categories will go under the scrutiny of industry and design experts.
