How to start an embroidery business

Choosing the Right Equipment

The next step in starting an embroidery business is selecting the right equipment. You will need:

• Embroidery machine: – now if you run a search on Amazon you will see tens if not hundreds of different brands and type of embroidery machines. There are also a lot of shops and online stores that sell them. The price will vary based on their capabilities. Our advice here is very simple: do not buy one needle embroidery machines if you want to do serious business. Speed is a very important element in this business. A professional machine can do an embroidery in 5 min as it automatically cuts the thread and changes the color. An entry level, one needle embroidery machine will need 30 min as you need to change the thread if the design has different colors. We recommend an embroidery machine that has at least 3 or 6 needles. This is the minimum to start with. If the business grows you can buy a second machine and have them work simultaneously. If you have the budget, you can buy machines with 2,3,4,8,16 heads. Each head has multiple needles. We have not bought our embroidery machine from a big brand. We have bought one from China through a UK based company that imports machinery. It costed us £5000. A similar embroidery machine, with 6 needles from a big brand is around £7000. After a year of abuse, ours is still working perfectly fine. It looks like it just warmed up.

• Thread – we used Amazon at the beginning then we done some research, and this is what we found. There are specialized online shops in the UK that sell thread, you just need to compare the prices. Two of them are PenCarrie and Marathon Threads. Select 6-8 colors that you will use the most such as red, dark blue, light blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, white and black. Most logos have these colors. Buy the 5km length, at least. If you run out of thread while embroidering 25 t-shirts and if you don’t have the same shade of thread, you are in a very bad position as a business. Your client will noticed that you used different colors and might not place another order.

• Stabilisers – There are three major types of embroidery stabilisers (also called backing): Cut Away, Tear Away, and Water Soluble. We use the cut away. You can try all of them and see which one works best for you. We use the same suppliers for stabilisers. For white garments we use white stabilisers, for darker ones we use black. There are a lot of tutorial videos on YouTube that teach you the basics of embroidery.

• Other supplies – you need 3-5 garment suppliers, special scissors for embroidery, chalk, ruler, standard small scissors, working station, storage boxes etc. You can buy embroidery supplies from a variety of retailers, including online stores and local craft stores. Be sure to compare prices and quality to get the best deal. Regarding the garment suppliers we always found that their stock is limited. Sometimes we had to order supplies from 2-3 places to fulfill a 50 pieces order.

• Digitising – is the method by which a logo in jpeg, jpg, png or pdf is converted into a file type that embroidery machines can read. There are softwares you can buy, and learn the skill. The price for these softwares range from Free to £800. Depends how good your IT skills are. We have learnt how to digitise but for us it works better if we outsource this. We went on Fiverr and hired a guy from Pakistan for the job. He digitieses logos for £5 and in 1 hour he will send you the design in the correct format. Some machines use dst files, some use pes. If there are errors in the file and the embroidery machine breaks the thread, you can go back to him and he will fix the design. We strongly suggest doing good research on digitising as you have no business without this element.

Consider your budget and the size of your business when choosing equipment. You can start small and upgrade as your business grows.