Personalizing & Labeling Your Tech Accessories

It’s time for Back-to-School and many kids have already started.  My kids began last week.  I’m sure you noticed, as I did, the plethora of colorful choices in school supplies available today.  No longer are our kids stuck with the one color PeeChee folder’s we had as children.  No school supply is left without a color choice including pens, rulers, folders, erasers, even the once old and boring composition notebook.  Even many of our tech accessories (mouse, keyboards, etc.) are now available in colors…but as you know…color means extra money.

In an effort to economize while trying to personalize…and organize, I reached for a couple of colorful options to help spruce up my kids school and tech supplies, while enhancing their creativity and personal achievement.  With the help of Duck Tape and Sharpies, my kids and I went to task.

I have to say, even though our efforts weren’t perfect, I was pretty impressed with the results and we had a lot of fun personalizing and labeling our accessories in the process.

Personalizing Your Tech Accessories with Color

We have a number of items including a mouse pad, phone holders,  phone cases, and a ton of USB thumb drives that we were anxious to personalize and make our own.  All of these items I received by attending conferences.  They were all branded with a company name on them, making them less desirable for my children to want to use.  They much preferred the pretty mouse pads and USB thumb drives available at the store.  But now that we customized them, my kids really like them and feel the pride of accomplishment in decorating them.

Take a look at our before and after pictures:

These pictures show the multiple USB drives we adorned with color.  They turned out so good, we are now thinking about giving them to our kids’ teachers as a part of their appreciation gifts at Christmas time or at the end of school.  We used Sharpies to write on each one how big the USB thumb drive is.

My daughter is particularly proud of her new mouse pad.  Before, she was using a nice thick mouse pad that said KRAFT across it.  Being black, it didn’t appeal to her much.  Duck Tape makes sheets of Duck Tape Fabric that made personalizing her mouse pad super easy…and it looks beautiful!

Here are some phone holders we had – they used to have company’s names on it, now they look super cool!

Here are some car phone chargers I picked up from my BlogHer conference this year, doesn’t it look good in flamingo?

Here’s another car phone charger.  I love Samsung, but this phone charger is much more colorful with Duck tape!

Now onto phone covers.  Have a boring black cellphone cover?  Spice it up!

My daughter had fun using different Duck Tapes to make this fun creation for my iPhone 5.

Another black iPhone case turned colorful…and fun!

Labeling Your Tech Accessories

After you get a few gadgets, you start to accumulate a number of cords and chargers.  Many of them will work with multiple devices, but sometimes it’s nice to know which original cord and charger belongs to which device.

In addition, it’s nice to label your cords and chargers with your name so that if you leave them somewhere or get them mixed up with someone else’s, you know which one is yours.

And with different color Sharpies, you can still add your creative spin to your labeling!  I used the Neon Green Sharpie for some extra flair!

We labeled our Kindle cord with a gold Sharpie.  This helps the kids identify right away which plug they should use to recharge our Kindle Fire HDX.

Using a Sharpie pen makes labeling your tech easy.  It’s simple to label your white color chargers and cords, but what do you do with the black ones?  I have tried a white mailing label wrapped around the cord, and this works fine for a little bit.  But after awhile, the tag tatters or even rips off.

I found a solution to this problem.  Sharpie now makes metallic pens that show up on black cords and chargers.  The bronze and silver colors in particular are striking and you can see clearly see what the cord/charger belongs to.

But the fun with Sharpie Metallic markers doesn’t stop at labeling!  My daughter, the Sharpie artist, created her own fun spin on this once boring mouse.

Looks great, doesn’t?

With the fine point Sharpies, I was able to write clearly and legibly on even small tech accessories such as this USB dongle for my mouse.  I have a number of these USB dongles for various mice, keyboards, and more, so writing directly on them will help me to know at a glance which devices they belong to.

A wide variety of Duck Tape colors and Sharpies can be found at your local Walmart or Walmart.com.  Look for the Duck Tape Fabric Sheets, they are less than $3 a sheet, and you can buy it in rolls too.  You can get a Neon Sharpie 5-Pk for $6.75 and Metallic Sharpies start for as little as $1.10 a pen.

A Mom’s Perspective

Technology can make our lives easier and more efficient.  It can also make it more fun.  Our kids are used to vibrant colors in their candy, foods, clothes, shoes, and even hair.  It makes sense that they’d want their school supplies and gadgets to reflect their personalities too.

But color and personalization come at a price and if you’ve already spent the money to buy your kids devices and accessories that are dull for them, Duck Tape and Sharpies can do the trick to make their devices and accessories all their own…in original style.

Labeling your tech is important too.  Believe me, it won’t be long until you have accumulated a bunch of cords, chargers, and devices.  Labeling the cords/chargers or each of your child’s devices will help you identify whose is whose and what belongs to what.

Don’t spend extra money on more devices when you don’t need to.  And the best thing about personalizing your own?  If down the road you get tired of a particular Duck Tape personalization…you can just re-tape!