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Advice need on Embroidery Machines
Hi All,
I’m not sure this is the right topic so apologizes now as couldn’t find one that suited. (Rob feel free to move)
Right well we have decided to buy an embroidery machine, this is a new area to us, we have done research but advice from others is always better I find.
We are unsure where to start, which machine to buy and learning to digitize images etc or who to get to do them?
All help would be appreciated.
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3 Replies
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Hi Craig,
Its an expensive investment and one machine does not give you much of a return. ( Im sure you know that ). Software is another problem as well. Do you buy only text editing software which is cheaper or the full package for text and design.
One thing that is a must, look for the supplier that will give you the best training and support. Dont take the suppliers word for it either, try and get the supplier to give you some names of their customers and speak to them. If they dont then be careful. Many suppliers will happily take your money and give no help when you have problems. Software; whichever route you take you must have help there too. Its easy to learn to digitise text but logos are time consuming and much harder to do properly. You could start with just text software and farm out the digitising to a specialist firm.
Machines ( my opinion) ; the best are Barudan and Tajima. SWF, ZSK , Brother industrial and maybe Melco AmayaXT come next.
Software: Wilcom, Pulse seem to be the best, certainly the support is good. Embird seems to have a good name and is a more reasonable price as well. Lots more out there, look around.
You could look at the Brother PR series . They have built in software for text and small designs.
It all comes down to support, without it the machine is an expensive door stop.
Earl -
Hi Craig
As Earl has already said, the software side is the biggest learning curve.
We use pulse. But since you are from a signbackground I would suggest looking at Coreldrawings, a combination of corel vector program and wings embroidery program. Change vectors to embroidery files with a few clicks.
Embroidery software comes in many stages, from very basic to really complex, hence the suggestion for corel.
The main problem with embroidery, the garment will move when you fill it with stitches, so you have to compensate with the design, circles you might have to make as an oval for example, different materials will react in different ways…. Complex design we farm out to get digitized, people will do it for $15 and you can get on with other things.
Machines I would suggest Happy or Tajima. We have a SWF, its 10 years old, we bought it from new. Alittle noisy but its OK Its a 4 head so we can do 4 garments in 1 go if we wish. As above support and training is the key.
Our investment 10 years ago was approx £24000. I personally would look at the profit available for your investment. In all honesty we could have invested that into something alot more profitable….
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Good point Denise, I forgot Coreldrawings, what I saw of it it works very well. Being able to convert vector to embroidery is a big bonus and saves a lot of time.
To get money from the machine(s) you need them running at least four hours a day and you need to charge a minimum of 15 pounds an hour running time. That is per head. At that rate you earn 300 pounds a week and then the costs come off of that. Then , of course , you make your money on the garment.
I have two single heads and I hope to buy a third next year. My business is purely garment printing and embroidery, no sign work. If you buy a machine then to get your money back , you will need to put a lot of time and effort into learning and running it. But if you can do that and build on it then its very rewarding both for the money you make and the "feel good" feeling of the work produced.
Earl
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