How do you justify getting into the embroidery business

[rmonks]

Man I hate being at the mercy of a contract embroider, I have 6 grand in blank polo's  setting at an embroidery contractor, and need to get them done, but don't feel good rushing them. Times like this is when  I would like to get into the business but don't know how and when to do so, don't know crap about machines etc.

[aauusa]

look for a new embroider.  we do all of our contract out the door in lees than 5 days from approval of everything,  total time is about 10day with shipping.

not the cheapest but worth deing on time and fast

[shirtz]

I was in the same position that you are and ended up just diving into buying and running my own sin.gle head machine. Within 6 months I had two other single heads. That was 12 years ago. We noe have eleven heads including our original single head.
This biz is hard enough without being at the mercy of a sub. It's definitley a steep learning curve but I have never looked back.
Just my 2 cents

[bj]

I think it is a great business to be in and we are all here to help you walk through it.  Yes, it is like Greek when starting but there are many people here that give great advice  on what machines to buy and troubleshooting the machines....

[Gilligan]

Greek?  More like Voodoo... no one wants to share any secrets.

[stitches4815]

We were quite the opposite.  We first started with embroidery then got into screen printing.  The nice thing about our situation is when we are busy printing our embroidery side is slow and when we are busy with embroidery screen printing is slow.  This is works good for us considering I do 99% of the production. 

[GraphicDisorder]

Embroidery can be the most rewarding and most PITA there is, make no mistake about it.  But, with that type of volume of orders you are giving away a lot of profit, if you have those types of orders regularly I would consider getting some machines and getting people running them.  For us when one is slow the other is swamped so it bridges gaps for us when one is slower. 

If you have machine questions ask, there are many of us here with a machine or several. 

[Homer]

I'm on the otherside of the coin. We do a ton of wholesale signage and screening. We tell our customers to let us worry about the headaches, when the machines go down it's our problem. Opposite sorta theory with embroidery. I have a single head for sampling but anything else I send out. If their machine goes down, guess what - not my problem, not my expense to fix it, not my learning curve, not me staying up late to hit the deadline. I agree with money lost however I will take 500.00 for sending and e-mail vs 1000k and working my tail off for 5 days straight. . .  been there, done that. . .

[abchung]

This is how we started.
We use to contract our embroidery work out, then realised we can save a few bucks by getting one machine of 12 heads... We outsource our digitizing. After several years digitizing software started to reduce in price. So we started to learn how to digitize.(big learning curve).

Badly digitized program can lead to two major factors:
1. bad looking product.
or
2. cleaning the excess threads from the embroidery which can take a long  time.

good luck.

[bj]

Another way to look at it is, what separates you from the screen printer down the road.  What can you offer better and quicker than your competition???  If embroidery is that key, that would then justify having it in house.