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Embroidery => General Embroidery => Topic started by: Maxie on December 10, 2016, 03:46:58 PM
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I have been doing silk screen printing since 1994, now have 2 automatics print about 1000 shirts a day. We get quite a lot of orders for embroidery that we end send to sub contractors.
I want to try and find out if it will worth our while doing embroidery in house, I see that quite a lot of you do both.
What is the investment?
What size machine should we start with?
Which machine?
Is it profitable?
Is digitizing and running the machine difficult to learn?
I'd be starting from scratch, I know nothing about embroidery.
For me silk screen is like a hobby, will it be the same with embroidery or is it tedious and boring?
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we were in the same boat as you, I bought a 1 head, which most here will disagree with. And I am about to buy a four or 6 head depending on space. No where near as cool as screenprinting, but I really needed it done in house. Good luck.
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Hey Maxie,
With an operation of your size, I'd day yes and yes it is worth your time.
Even if your current send out volume isn't large because you many not of been outwardly selling it,
you have many contacts than will certainly need that "other half" of your industry.
And at your volume you probably have a chunk set aside for just such an investment.
This could be anywhere from $20K to $60K depending upon number of embroidery heads.
Size is connected to your projected volume, but wouldn't start with less than 6 heads in your case.
You can always add another 6 or 12 head, but will kick yourself if you start too small with 2 or 4 heads.
Tajima or Barudan or go home.
It can be very profitable with quality output. But of course don't expect to kick out like screen printing.
Profit comes in higher mark-up per piece of course. Therefore 6 heads and up.
Best to start sending out logos to get a handle on how they are created and stitched out. Digitizing can be very daunting
and hard to grasp unless someone spends a lot of time to learn aside from digitizing type and simple outputs.
"Slik screening" is like a hobby and fun for most of us - embroidery can be similar, but takes commitment to succeed.
It can be frustrating at first, but if you or your staff are half technically minded, very rewarding in the end.
Threading needles is dainty. Pretty proficient here now, but starting out, I was saying - just give me a squeeze and let me jam some ink through a screen!
Wish you well over there- hopefully the economy may be doing better world round these days. :)
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At the homeland of Tajima we pay around US$25,000 for the latest single head model. That`s incl. the software. A 6 head will be around $40,000 incl. the soft.
We are considering as well to first get a single head, see how that goes and then upgrade to a 6 head. Never head a request for anything over 100 pcs but then we do not officially offer embroidery services on our website. I assume as soon as we do that the whole situation might change.
We would get 2 days of training with someone from Tajima.
I don`t think it is a much fun as screen printing though.
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I checked our figures, we are paying about $3000 a month for embroidery to sub contractors.
Seems like a no brainer, just got to check out carefully what's involved.
I'm going to ISS Long Beach so I'll see what I can find out there, maybe go to a lectures.
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I checked our figures, we are paying about $3000 a month for embroidery to sub contractors.
Seems like a no brainer, just got to check out carefully what's involved.
I'm going to ISS Long Beach so I'll see what I can find out there, maybe go to a lectures.
You got a time of the year when the shop is not as busy? That would be a good time to get the embroidery dep. set up. Lead times for us are 3 month for an embroidery machine from Tajima.
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What is the investment? - I would bank on 50k to start.
What size machine should we start with? 4-6 Heads at least.
Which machine? Barudan or Tajima, dismiss all other options.
Is it profitable? Yes.
Is digitizing and running the machine difficult to learn? It is not a overnight thing, sub your digitizing in the beginning but buy your digitizing software and learn as you go. You will need to learn to edit files quickly as often a digitized file still would need a tweak once its test sewn.
If you are paying 3k a month already in embroidery, IMO, you could buy a 6 head, pay the note on it and pay your labor. Now you are probably just going to be about even on that for a bit but as you grow you will have it in house and better control over it.
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i agree with everything posted above. You should be doing it in house at that rate. I also find the "if you build it they will come" model to work in this case since you have the customer base in printing already, adding another service that interlocks with what you offer will only open them up more.
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I agree with the above comments. If you take the plunge, also take all the classes you can (from the manuf. of the machine, ISS, etc.) on digitizing, hooping, pricing and so forth.
Another thing this will open up for you is the ability to COMBINE services on garments. One of the things we do is embroider the left chest and do a large screen print back on shirts for construction/renovation/housing repair companies. When you are within arms-length of someone (like conversations, shaking hands), embroidery looks really good and very professional. When that same person has their back to you and is working at the other end of the property, you can see the screen printing and know they are part of the crew.
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I just did exactly this, bought a shiny new 4 head Barudan, so far so good, but don't expect to be running as fast as your sub-contractor for a few months at least, there is a lot to learn and it's pretty fiddly to start with.
Don't cheap out on a machine! you don't want some cranky P.O.S. fighting you as you learn, and make sure you have good local technician support!
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IMO Tajima and Wilcom software. we have a 6 head and a couple of Toyata single heads. talk to jeff at hirsh booth at the long each show.
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You can't go wrong with either Barudan or Tajima. If I had to do it over again I would buy another Barudan, and immediately switch to poly threads. The SWF hated poly. We had nothing but loops no matter what we did.
Our production is WAY up. We actually are up over 50% in embroidery billings and up over 100% in amount of goods embroidered. (we took on a contract customer). We did all that on only 1 more head.
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My best advice is buy biggest machine you can possibly buy. If I had to do it all again I wouldn't buy less than a 4 head ever again, no way no how. Either I can get a 4 head or bigger or I don't do embroidery.
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2 heads don't make financial sense honestly. You can buy 2 singles for less money.
4 heads are a great start. 6's are a better bet, we usually run 7 heads, or 6 and use the single for name drops. For the $200 a month the single costs us it makes it back EASILY. If it was our only machine or if we only had 2 of them I would scream.
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2 heads don't make financial sense honestly. You can buy 2 singles for less money.
4 heads are a great start. 6's are a better bet, we usually run 7 heads, or 6 and use the single for name drops. For the $200 a month the single costs us it makes it back EASILY. If it was our only machine or if we only had 2 of them I would scream.
Id agree and only add that if you only had a single head you'd struggle to make money in a lot of markets. Hat production for example in my market, not a chance at making money on a single head. 10-15k stitches on many hats we run here. Some as many as 25k stitches. Imagine that on a single head, 30 minute run time on a hat if it doesn't stop at all? 2pcs a hour, 16pcs in a 8 hour day. Makes your eyes cross. We did it for awhile but then math took over and we added a 2 head. Which helped but was still a mistake for our market.
Now name drops all day, ya you could make money on it, but id still argue in some cases a single head would be hard to turn much profit time you pay someone to run it, that is if you are counting the time to make the sale, digitize the name, set up the name, run it, manage the garment and so on. Getting what around $5 bucks each, it wont go far. But if you had a single head sitting next to a 4 or 6 head now you can make real sense of that single head. I would probably still have a 6 head sitting in the single heads place though, for capacity sake and with a 6 head clocking in at about 1k a month on a lease, zero issues making that pay. We probably pay for that machine in 1 business day.
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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.
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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.
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You're right, if we had another 6 we probably wouldn't use the single near as much...maybe next year. ;)
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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.
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I bet we dont even do 100 names in a month, thats a good reason not to need a single head.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.