Thinking about embroidery

[mk162]

We also use a single for sewouts and edits.  Makes more sense to let the 6 run production and do sampling on a single.

So in other words..shut up, I am trying to justify a purchase.

I would actually buy it again, but I wouldn't buy another  1 single is enough.

[GraphicDisorder]

We also use a single for sewouts and edits.  Makes more sense to let the 6 run production and do sampling on a single.

So in other words..shut up, I am trying to justify a purchase.

I would actually buy it again, but I wouldn't buy another  1 single is enough.

Every shop is different. My shop my team is often doing a bulk run on our 6 head, and do the first test of the next job on the other 6 head. Then off to races on that machine and then both are running jobs, it's 1 cycle for that test most often so its not really much of a waste. Then rinse and repeat. We have 10 other heads we do combination of the same with. One of the 4 heads we have we really only use for hat backs though just because its got good hoops for that (SWF) so its always just doing backs.  We gave away our single head.

[mk162]

You're right, if we had another 6 we probably wouldn't use the single near as much...maybe next year.

[inkman996]

You all are crazy I cannot imagine not having a single head. It is used all day long every day for everything from test runs, short runs, and names. Doing names on it is the best, why tie up one of our 8 heads to do a run of a hundred plus names? It was a compulsive purchase, our emb tech said he knew of a late model single head barudan for $5k so we jumped on it and boy what a great buy it was.

[GraphicDisorder]

I bet we dont even do 100 names in a month, thats a good reason not to need a single head.

[Maxie]

I checked the Tajima that has a agent here, I see there are 6, 8 or 12 heads.
How many heads can one person run?
This is not something I will jump into, the replies have been very helpful.
Looks like I'll go to the embroidery lectures at Long Beach and will make a economic plan.
The local agent said that other than the machine the only other costs really are wages.
He also said a machine should be able to do $10,000 of work a month.    Sound feasible?

[Doug B]

  If it's a high stitch count, one person can run a 12 and keep up with the hooping.
Low stitch counts and it would need two people without the machine sitting idle
waiting to be loaded up again. Even with 12 heads you could use another person
just for triming/finishing as they come off of the machine.

[GraphicDisorder]

I checked the Tajima that has a agent here, I see there are 6, 8 or 12 heads.
How many heads can one person run?
This is not something I will jump into, the replies have been very helpful.
Looks like I'll go to the embroidery lectures at Long Beach and will make a economic plan.
The local agent said that other than the machine the only other costs really are wages.
He also said a machine should be able to do $10,000 of work a month.    Sound feasible?

Depends on the person. We had 3 running 22 heads at one point and still wasn't done well.

Now we have 1 running as many as 22 and she is out putting almost 2x what the 3 where doing. The mix of work has changed some but its drastically better now. Sometimes she is running just a 6 head, some times all 22. But generally we fill up machines 6 heads first, then 4 heads, then the 2 head.

[islandtees]

You all are crazy I cannot imagine not having a single head. It is used all day long every day for everything from test runs, short runs, and names. Doing names on it is the best, why tie up one of our 8 heads to do a run of a hundred plus names? It was a compulsive purchase, our emb tech said he knew of a late model single head barudan for $5k so we jumped on it and boy what a great buy it was.

Inkman you are right. We have multiple 6 and 4 heads. We have a single for tests or names not to tie up the other machines.

[jvieira]

A little late to this but here's my 2 cents.

At the beginning of the year we were paying our sub contractor around 1000€ a month. That's exactly what an employee costs me a month (we're in Portugal, wages are low compared to the US). We wouldn't market embroidery a lot because we knew we depended on others and it was always a logistic nightmare.
I was having A LOT of problems with logistics, delays, lack of production control, etc (even shipping costs need to be considered in the math).

I read a lot on this forum but at the end I could only afford a 2 head machine. Went around and bought it. Did our magic with promoting the new in house service and not a month later, we traded it in for a 4 head machine so we could keep up with growing demand. 5 months later, we have just added a 2nd 4 head machine to keep up with orders. We now run 8 heads all day, everyday. My only regret is not having enough capital to purchase a larger machine (8 head), I know we will need it soon.

In the space of 12 months our embroidery orders have gone up over 100% and the tendency is for them to keep growing next year.

We do market it a lot now and will continue to do it in the future.
Costs aside (which one needs to always consider), we can now guarantee quality control and delivery dates, which is something we always struggled with before.

My advice is buy the biggest and best machine you can.
This is our story. We are still tweaking things so we can improve our efficiency.

[Maxie]

Thanks for the input.
How long did it take you to start producing reasonable embroidery?
Do you digitize in house?
I have checked it out here, the local agent for Tajima is good and gives good service, he also does contract work and is prepared to teach us how to embroider.     He says that there are good digitizing services locally and he passes this cost onto the customer, like a screen charge.
I'll go for a 8 head Tajima, this will cost me about $50,000. 
Let's say $60,000 with shipping, program etc.      I'd like to lease this or take a five year loan.
$1000 a month, I'm paying $3000 a month now to send the work out.       A good worker who will run it will cost about $1800 a month.
I'm going to ISS Long Beach and have signed up for some embroidery lectures.
I'll most probably do this next winter, I cannot get a machine until close to the summer amd we are too busy then for me to set it up.

[Inkworks]

We started producing good embroidery on day 1. Don't get me wrong, there is a learning curve, and you'll ruin a few garments along the way, and probably break a few machine parts  too (needle bar driver for us) but that falls under the cost of learning. Make sure you have someone good to take charge of running it and you'll do fine. Your math easily justifies making the investment in you're own machine i.m.o.