Custom slipmats for bars, clubs and venues

A turntable mat is the one object in a listening room that faces the ceiling, sits under a light, and is photographed every time somebody puts a record on. That is why venues order their own.

Why do bars and clubs order their own slipmats?

Because it is the cheapest piece of branding in the room that people actually look at.

A mat is a 298.5 mm circle at waist height, lit, and in the frame of every photograph taken of the decks. It stays in the room, it is part of the equipment rather than decoration placed beside it, and it is replaced when it wears rather than when a season changes. Most promotional items have to earn attention. This one already has it, because the person at the decks is looking straight down at it for the length of a side.

The orders we see fall into four shapes: a bar or restaurant with a deck behind the counter, a club or a listening room with two, a record label pressing a run to go out with a release, and an audio brand giving them away at a trade show or with a turntable.

What does a custom run cost?

$45 a mat from four mats, plus a $150 design fee that is waived above fifty.

Volume pricing starts at ten. The design fee covers setting your artwork up for the press and proofing it, and it is charged once rather than per mat, so it matters at four and is irrelevant at a hundred. A reorder carries no design fee at all, because your file stays on record and the setup has already been done. The full terms sit on the custom page.

What is the minimum order?

Four mats.

Four is where a press run stops being more expensive to set up than to print. Below that the setup dominates the cost so completely that we would be charging you more for less. The custom run product enforces the floor on the quantity field, so you cannot accidentally order three and wait for an email telling you so.

Most venue orders are not near the floor. Two decks and a spare is three, which is the one case where four feels like one too many, and it is also the order that comes back as a reorder six months later with a mat behind the bar and a mat in a frame.

How long does a custom run take?

Two to three weeks from artwork approval, not from the order.

The distinction matters if you are ordering for an opening. The clock starts when you have seen a proof and said yes, and the proof depends on how quickly your artwork arrives and how many rounds it takes. Send print-ready artwork and a date three weeks out is comfortable. Send a logo that needs redrawing and it is not.

Nothing is printed before you approve the proof. That is a rule rather than a courtesy: a run of fifty mats with the wrong shade of a brand colour is fifty wrong mats, so we would rather hold the whole thing than guess.

Our stocked mats ship in two days, which is worth knowing if what you need is mats on the decks by Friday rather than your mats specifically. The house mats are the same felt.

What artwork do you need to send?

Vector if you have it, or anything at 300dpi, square, and designed to run to the edge.

Vector artwork scales to the mat with no loss, which is why it is the first ask. A logo as an AI, EPS, PDF or SVG file is ideal. Failing that, a raster file at 300dpi at full size is fine, which for a 298.5 mm mat means roughly 3500 pixels square.

Four things worth getting right before you send it:

• Square canvas, circular crop. The mat is a circle. Anything in the corners of your file is outside the mat.
• Run the background past the edge. Give the artwork a few millimetres of bleed so a hair of rotational tolerance never shows as a pale crescent at the rim.
• Keep type away from the middle. There is a spindle hole at the centre and a record over most of the face. Type set small in the middle is covered while the music plays.
• Name your colours. If a brand colour has to be exact, tell us what it is. Printing is a four-colour process and felt is a textile, so a colour read off a screen is a starting point rather than a target.

The upload field on the product takes the file and draws it on a mat in the browser before you order, so you can see where the circle falls. There is a gallery of finished runs under your designs.

Should a mat be printed on one side or two?

One, unless you have a reason for two.

Two-sided mats are pressed twice, and the second pass can leave fine speckling on the first face. It shows most in large flat areas of white and light tints, and it is effectively invisible in dark or busy artwork. So a black mat with a white logo takes two sides happily; a mat that is mostly pale cream does not.

The reason to take two anyway is that a venue mat gets flipped. One side carries the venue and the other carries a night, a label or a guest, and the mat changes meaning by being turned over.

What actually goes on a venue mat?

Less than you would think, and bigger than you would think.

A mat is read from standing height by somebody looking down at a spinning disc, and for most of its working life two-thirds of it is covered by a record. That rules out a tagline, a phone number, a web address and a street address, all of which have been proposed and none of which can be read. What survives is a wordmark, a single strong mark, or a field of colour with a name at the edge.

The other thing that survives is the rim, because it is the part never covered by a twelve inch record. A ring of type around the outer edge reads while a record plays, which a centred logo does not.

How do custom mats hold up in a working room?

They are the same mat we sell by itself, which is the point.

Custom runs are printed on the same 21oz heavyweight felt as the stocked mats, 298.5 mm across and 3.18 mm thick, by dye sublimation, which puts the colour into the fibre rather than onto it. Nothing sits on the surface to abrade a record, and the print does not crack or lift as the felt flexes. The full numbers are on the spec page.

In a bar the thing that ages a mat is not play, it is everything else in a bar. Mats collect dust, ash and the occasional spill, and a dirty mat is a mat that puts grit between felt and vinyl. A spare in the drawer and five minutes of care a month is the whole maintenance plan, and it is set out in how to clean a slipmat.

If the decks are being played rather than displayed, the mat is also doing the job it was invented for. That history is in why DJs use slipmats, and the question of what it does to the sound is in do slipmats improve sound quality.

How do you order one?

Upload the artwork on the product page, or ask for a quote first if the numbers are not settled.

Ordering directly takes one step: choose a quantity of four or more on the custom run, attach your file, tell us the brand or venue and what the mats are for, and a proof follows. Nothing is produced until you approve it, and once production starts the order is final, which is the ordinary condition of anything printed to order.

If you do not have artwork yet, or you want a number before you commit, the quote form on the custom page needs three things: the brand or venue, the quantity, and what it is for. The artwork can follow in the reply.

Mats ship flat in a record jacket rather than rolled, with a care card in every one, because felt keeps a curl once it has been given one.