Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Is A Embroidery Business A Viable Business For You?

One does not have to look far to find some form of embroidery. Embroidery is located on hats, shirts, jackets, and coats which generates millions of dollars each year for the people that embroider these garments. Is it possible to make money as an embroider? You bet.

Embroidery is actually an art form that happens to be huge business. Embroidery is the art of using needlework to adorn garments with various logos, symbols and design and adding the value of the dollar to make it a profitable business. Large portions of company advertising budgets go toward embroidery with branding being the much sought after result. Embroidery has a long tradition, tracing origins all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, revealing the fact that embroidery is not a passing fad.

With the advent of computer technology, embroidery has become streamlined and even more profitable than in the past. Embroidery machines are now computerized with design software that can generate just about any design imaginable. In just few moments, digital embroidery machines can stitch a logo or other design in what would take someone days to do by hand.

Completely programmable and designed on a computer screen embroiders in the computer age, simply push a button and like magic the design appears on the garment. The embroider also chooses the type of stitch and thread color through the computer software, making the whole process both rapid and efficient. Streamlined production is one of the reasons that make embroidery a profitable business in the computer age, reducing a once labor intensive job into a productive, viable business.

Embroidery is everywhere, so potential customers are available just outside the door. Little League teams are a great source of potential customers for embroiders. Just about every type of work uniform has some form of designed embroidery. Bowling leagues, cheerleading and dance squads, country clubs and golf clubs. The pool of potential customers is like an abyss with no clear bottom. School sports teams and local service companies are other prospects that would be approachable for business.

Another sector of the embroidery business is travel bags, purses, blankets and mattress covers. Although these items are more difficult to embroider and special equipment may be required, this is a niche that is also available to people considering opening their own embroidery business. The possibilities are endless.

Acquiring customers would probably be the most difficult part of building an embroidery business. But this is only if a person is not very aggressive in making sales calls on potential customers. One idea that does not require any sales ability is the local dry cleaner. Almost all dry cleaners offer alterations or sewing in some form and the dry cleaner may need help and could be interested in sub-contracting some of their workload. Local community centers and grocery stores often have bulletin boards available to post flyers. The neighborhood paper usually has a section to run inexpensive ads for advertisement of services. For aggressive types, nothing works better than canvassing local businesses and cold calling.

If you have the combined talents of both artist and craftsman along with the can do attitude of an entrepreneur, an embroidery business may be the right choice for you. Starting small, with one embroidery machine, while acquiring a few customers, word of mouth and repeat business will soon have you on your way to a growing and profitable embroidery business. Used and refurbished machines can be purchased for less than new machines and can help save on start up cost until you earn enough profit to purchase newer machines as your business grows. Now that computers dominate the embroidery industry, this once laborious job is now an efficient and profitable business opportunity.

Orginal article found here:http://www.articlesbase.com/careers-articles/is-a-embroidery-business-a-viable-business-for-you-351805.html

Embroidered Shirt

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Finding Your Niche With An Embroidery Digitizing Business

You have everything in place to start an embroidery digitizing business. You've done all your research. You have a business plan in place and have contracted out for your own website.
With all of the competition out there, how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?

When you are first starting out, you may decide that you want to focus on a certain type of image to digitize into an embroidery pattern. You may choose dragons, flowers or frogs. If you focus on similar pictures at first, you will get faster at doing these type of images. Not only will you get faster at digitizing these pictures into embroidery patterns, but you will get better at it.

If this is how you decide to start out with digitizing embroidery patterns, you will want to choose a niche that you are interested in. When you are digitizing a new design, you will need to embroider it to make sure that it turns out okay. If you don't like dragons or faeries, and that is the type of image you are digitizing into embroidery patterns, not only will you have samples around that you aren't interested in, but you won't feel the urge to get the images as close to perfect as you would if you love flowers and you are digitizing flower images into embroidery patterns.

If you are going to offer to digitize images that people send you into embroidery patterns, you will eventually want experience at digitizing a variety of images, not just the type of images in your niche. When you work by request, you will be working with a wide variety of images to digitize into embroidery patterns, not simply one specific type.

Something that really needs to be mentioned any time that you talk about doing specialized work for customers. With people sending images to you to digitize into embroidery patterns, you may face another issue that you haven't seen mentioned before. When you buy a digitized embroidery pattern file at the store, the company who digitized these patterns will have paid to use any trademarked images.

That's is something very important that you will want to keep in mind. The NFL, collegiate teams or large corporations such as Disney will sue anyone using their trademarked images without permission. You will get a letter before they take you to court, but don't count on being able to just slide by. The big companies have lawyers and are always looking for people who are breaking copyright laws.

There are plenty of legal ways to get around the copyright laws, however if you have any doubts about whether you are violating these laws, your best bet is to play it safe.<br /><br />