Back to the Future: The Year-Long Process of Building a Calendar

Hopefully, wherever you are, you are enjoying a nice June day in 2017. In our Calendar Development office at COMDA, we are halfway through 2019!  That’s because it takes our team of researchers, writers, designers and artists an entire year to develop our annual line of promotional wall calendars.

It all starts with meetings to assess input from our thousands of active customers to identify what they like or don’t like and what new titles would appeal. Then our photo researchers begin the long task of finding high quality photo and art images for each title. Often we will look at hundreds of potential images to whittle the final selection down to the twelve per calendar we need each year. Once our art committee makes final approval of the images, the research team must contact the rights holders of each in order to secure the license to reproduce them in our calendars.

Many of our titles include various helpful tips or other detailed text.  Our researchers and creative writers draft their copy for editorial approval. The design team then pull together both image and text, along with a range of other creative elements such as important holidays, moon phases, best fishing dates, etc. The first proof of each calendar goes through several phases of proof reading before a book proof comes off the press for final approval.

Once all titles have gone through final proofing, we can begin printing which is a yearlong process in and of itself. We try to keep about 15 million calendars ready on the floor so we can imprint and deliver to our customers’ needs and schedules. Once we print the first 2019 titles, the development team starts the entire process again for 2020!

As this process always begins with customer feedback from the current year, we welcome your comments, suggestions and even criticism.  Our goal is to achieve 100% satisfaction with our product.