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Embroidered Clothing – 5 Top Tips on how to make sure you get the right products at the right price

Embroidered Clothing is at the top end of the Promotional Clothing scale yet it is very easy to end up with a poor quality garment and even poorer looking embroidery. This article explains the potential pitfalls of buying embroidered clothing and how to avoid them.

1. Make sure you research any potential supplier properly.

It is amazing how many people trust a great looking website when in fact the owner of the site has no more than a shed at the bottom of the garden or even worse a worn out chair in his local internet caf?Pretty pictures on a website mean nothing without a substantial company behind them. Find out the facts of who you are dealing with before you send them money or an order, how long have they been in business, does their address check out etc. Never trust a potential supplier who is not willing to provide references, what do they have to hide.

2. Check out your suppliers suppliers

Lots of Promotional Merchandise suppliers say that they are manufacturers but last’s face it, unless you have a few thousand acres of cotton fields then you can’t really be a manufacturer of cotton garments can you? That said, even Ford don’t manufacturer all the bits for their cars and they still call themselves manufacturers so it’s fair enough if your supplier has a production facility maybe with some embroidery machines or Silk Screen carousels at least they are then part of the manufacturing process. Make sure you find out what clothing brands your supplier deals in. Brands such as Fruit of the Loom, Gildan, Hanes etc are well known international manufacturers whose products you can generally depend upon. If your proposed manufacturers are recommending garments from El-Cheepo T-shirts or Itch & Scratch it Polo Shirts then beware. Any decent supplier of Promotional Merchandise will be trading with the large brands and if they are not then get those running shoes on again.

3. Who is creating the computer disk of your artwork that runs the machines?

A great piece of embroidery is guaranteed as long as these delicate and very complicated machines are cared for properly. However they can only ever be as good as the computer programme that runs them. When you send your artwork to an embroiderer the design has to go through a process called Digitisation. Fortunately the author of this article is a simple soul who does not understand a lot of technical stuff so I will explain it thus. Your design is uploaded into a computer programme that tells the embroidery machine how many stitches are required to embroider your design, where the stitches go, in what order and how big. A proper embroiderer will have this process in-house so that they can ensure that your design is created in such a way as to suit the fabric you have chosen. Avoid any supplier who has to export his digitisation to India, China or Birmingham because they will never be able to interpret exactly what you want and it usually ends up in disaster. Any embroiderer who cannot digitise his own work should be avoided,so be prepared to put your running shoes on again.

4. Who is actually embroidering your shirts?

Wherever possible only ever use a supplier that has his own Screen print and Embroidery machines. Why use a middleman or an on-line company that has nothing but an office, what use are they to you when things go wrong. I would estimate that 80% of all problems with late deliveries of Screen Printed or Embroidered Garments are as a result of the 3rd party decorator delivering late or the carriers messing up between the manufacturer, the middlemen, the decorator and the client. There are just too many links in the chain. Ideally also use a supplier who carries large stocks of plain goods on the shelf.

5. Get a proof sample before you give the go ahead

Do not ever give the go ahead for an embroidery job until you have seen at the very least a digital image of your actual embroidery. Better still ask the embroiderer to send you a finished sample of a garment or a swatch of fabric with an example of the embroidery. Once the Promotional Garments are on the machines it is too late to change your mind because you cannot unpick even the most simple of designs.

I hope this article has given you some good advice on how to get the best embroidered garments. It’s not difficult to do once you have done your initial research and hopefully once you have found a good decorator you will stay with them.