How hard is embroidery to learn?

[dirkdiggler]

Just got a new barudan single head about a month ago.  I was told by most, don't buy a single head.  I just wanted to get started, get comfortable and get good first, so I bought it.  After just a few weeks of running the machine, and might I add the barudan is AMAZING!  Not sure I even know what a thread break is, it doesn't happen.  Worked in a shop with 40 plus heads of another brand and all day long dealt with thread breaks.  Anyway, yes, you can find used multi head machines for close to the same price, but I don't want someone elses problems and I never buy used.  That's just me.  Here is my honest opinion after running this thing now for a few weeks.  I can see why, sometimes my outsourced embroidery sux, I already know what they are doing wrong, and I can already do hats better than they can.  It pays to do it yourself.  Second and probably most important, DOUBT YOU WILL MAKE MUCH MONEY ON A SINGLE HEAD.  Its just to damn slow.  Hurry up and wait!  Its a good way to learn, but expensive too.  I wouldn't get rid of mine, but you better believe at least a 6 head is in my near future.

[mk162]

A single head is a great addition to existing machines.  especially since I guess Barudan has software to run them like a multi head machine pretty easily.  We will be adding one soon just because we have too much small work for the multi head.

[JBLUE]

Just got a new barudan single head about a month ago.  I was told by most, don't buy a single head.  I just wanted to get started, get comfortable and get good first, so I bought it.  After just a few weeks of running the machine, and might I add the barudan is AMAZING!  Not sure I even know what a thread break is, it doesn't happen.  Worked in a shop with 40 plus heads of another brand and all day long dealt with thread breaks.  Anyway, yes, you can find used multi head machines for close to the same price, but I don't want someone elses problems and I never buy used.  That's just me.  Here is my honest opinion after running this thing now for a few weeks.  I can see why, sometimes my outsourced embroidery sux, I already know what they are doing wrong, and I can already do hats better than they can.  It pays to do it yourself.  Second and probably most important, DOUBT YOU WILL MAKE MUCH MONEY ON A SINGLE HEAD.  Its just to damn slow.  Hurry up and wait!  Its a good way to learn, but expensive too.  I wouldn't get rid of mine, but you better believe at least a 6 head is in my near future.

This is what we did. Except we started with an SWF. It was great for the learning curve. If you can run one of those a Barudan is like driving a Ferrari compared to a Prius. We added a second single head which happened to be a Barudan. I could not sell that SWF fast enough after less than a day running the new machine.

The other route you can go if you want which works as well is to load up on single heads. 6 singles will out run a 6 head in a speed race. When you do have a thread break or a bobbin change all 6 heads stop. With the singles all the other heads keep running when one stops. I know a few people that all they run are singles for this reason. Space is also an issue that can factor in it too.

[3Deep]

We make money with our single head,(maybe not what some you can make on multi heads) while it's sewing we screen print or do other things, you just take the order's your comfy with just like you would doing screen printing don't bite off more than you can chew, plus you can do that even with a ton of equipment if your not careful.

[Prosperi-Tees]

I think my focus is not to have embroidery as a profit center per se but to have it be a gateway to the screen printing side, if the embroidery pays for itself then great.

When I first started screen printing I bought a Brother PR620 but never learned it because I was still learning how to print plus I had a full time job so I didn't give any effort into figuring out how it works so I sold it. Now I have more time and can put the effort into learning.

[Audifox]

We have two single heads.

 also don't run both machines simultaneously on a job (which I don't really agree with, but I don't interfere too much).  We will run them both if we have different jobs to get done at the same time and we DO run them both sometimes when we got to get a job done or it's larger... I just think we should almost always be running both on anything past 10 or so.

If the machines are not the same brand you will notice a difference in the embroidery from one machine to the other. I run singles, and there is a difference between brands on how  a design sews out.
This may be why they don't want to run the same job on the two machines.

[GraphicDisorder]

We have two single heads.

 also don't run both machines simultaneously on a job (which I don't really agree with, but I don't interfere too much).  We will run them both if we have different jobs to get done at the same time and we DO run them both sometimes when we got to get a job done or it's larger... I just think we should almost always be running both on anything past 10 or so.

If the machines are not the same brand you will notice a difference in the embroidery from one machine to the other. I run singles, and there is a difference between brands on how  a design sews out.
This may be why they don't want to run the same job on the two machines.

We've even seen differences in 2 machines that are the same brand. (SWF).  Good machines but not great machines.

[Gilligan]

We have two single heads.

 also don't run both machines simultaneously on a job (which I don't really agree with, but I don't interfere too much).  We will run them both if we have different jobs to get done at the same time and we DO run them both sometimes when we got to get a job done or it's larger... I just think we should almost always be running both on anything past 10 or so.

If the machines are not the same brand you will notice a difference in the embroidery from one machine to the other. I run singles, and there is a difference between brands on how  a design sews out.
This may be why they don't want to run the same job on the two machines.

Yeah, but you are assuming he's putting thought into that process.

[Inkworks]

Emb. has been on my mind too, We had a lady with her 4 head Tajima here in-shop for a while, but she's moved to her garage. She still does our work, but it makes for some logistical issues and I've rather have it in-house so I've started exploring getting a machine.

As far as profitability, it's not so much making big money on the embroidery itself, but the fact that most embroidered garments and hats have greater margins and overall higher values than t-shirts. A run of 50 jackets with $50 profit on each one adds up in a hurry!

[Prosperi-Tees]

In our office we only have room for a single head, a 2 head would be pushing it. Are machines tolerant of temp swings? In the winter it could be 40 degrees in the shop and summer could be 120.

[JBLUE]

In our office we only have room for a single head, a 2 head would be pushing it. Are machines tolerant of temp swings? In the winter it could be 40 degrees in the shop and summer could be 120.

Temp no. Humidity and static charge yes.

[dirkdiggler]

In our office we only have room for a single head, a 2 head would be pushing it. Are machines tolerant of temp swings? In the winter it could be 40 degrees in the shop and summer could be 120.

same here, that's another reason I bought a single, we will be adding on to the shop a climate controlled embroidery room, so I can get a big machine.

[1964GN]

We are new to in-house embroidery. We ended up buying a chinese 4 head (Avance from Coldesi) 6 months ago. While we have had some issues they have all been over come (so far). Would we have prefer a better brand? Sure, but we wanted the most heads we could get that was in our budget. It is what it is.

Quality digitizing will be your largest hurdle... it's something we are still searching for.

What I can tell you with certainty is that you'll be longing for more heads. We recently did a 122 pc order... 27k left chest and 122 different name drops on the right chest. That's a 40-ish minute sew out per piece and would take you over 81 hours minimum on a single head just for the left chest. We are in the middle of a 2200 left chest order now. We would never have gotten either of these jobs with a single head. It's a bit of a challenge to make decent money with 4.

I don't like your idea of using as a gateway to screen printing work and not a profit center one bit. Every piece of equipment shout be part of the profit center. Period. If it's not you shouldn't be buying it.

Your situation is what it is. Do it as long as you understand that there will be little to no profit, and a possibly a drain on you patience and resources with a single.

[GraphicDisorder]

You nailed it. When you get down to math you are just not going to make much of any if any at all money on a single head. Now a gang of them, maybe. That will depend on your mix of work.  If your constantly doing just names or one off items, a gang of single heads may make sense.  We've approached it a bit different in that we believed we should have 4 and 6 head machines and multiples of each.  We often have large runs and we find it nice to have a bunch of multi-heads to run them on. We can blow through larger orders very quickly. Or we can even just run a single item on a 4 head while the rest of our machines are running big orders.  People get all freaked out about using a multi-head at times with just 1 or 2 items running on it now and then. Never understood that.  We use the the several multi-heads we have to be flexible be it with 1 item or 1000's. It's worked amazing for us. 

Remember, you can't be flexible with a single head, it runs 1 item.  No other options. 

[rmonks]

If you are a small one or two person shop, I would farm it out. I bought a 4 head Tajima and I could not figure out how to use the machine. But I did make money at embroidery. I bought the machine for $7K and sold it for $9K.