1. Embroidery Business Guide
   
   
2. Embroidery Designs - To digitise yourself or Outsource
   
   
3. Where to operate from
   
   
4. Choosing an embroidery machine type
   
   
5. Optimising work time
   
   
6. Machinery components
   
   
7. What to embroider
   
   
8. Marketing your own goods
   
   
9. In conclusion
   
   

Embroidery Designs - To digitise yourself or Outsource

Digitisation is the process of converting a text or graphic into a format that can be read by an embroidery machine. To create an embroidery design you need digitising software. This allows you to redraw a logo and separate the individual areas of colour so that it can be stitched by the embroidery machine. Software packages can vary from basic packages which are free to sophisticated commercial products that can cost £10,000.

The alternative is to subcontract the digitising of embroidery designs to an outside service who typically charge £3 to £5 per 1000 stitches to produce an embroidery design. The way this would work is that you would e-mail a logo to the digitiser. After converting the artwork they would send you back the digitised file that can be read by the embroidery machine.

The choice of how embroidery is digitised is critical to any embroidery business. A badly digitised embroidery design will look bad irrespective of how good your embroidery machine is. A logo digitised by someone that doesn’t understand the embroidery process will lead to higher costs to the embroiderer through thread breakages and reduced efficiency.

If you are serious about embroidery you need to know how you are going to handle digitisation.