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
   
   

Optimising work time

Obviously, the quicker you can produce quality merchandise, the quicker you can pass completed goods on to buyers, and the quicker you can accept more orders.

To achieve this, setting up your workspace to optimize time can help.

From start to finish, producing an embroidered item will involve several stages. You will need to set up the design and thread colours on your machine, hoop the garment, embroider it, un-hoop it, remove the backing and loose threads, and then package the finished item.

This all sounds very time consuming, and poor organisation of your workspace can make it so. By setting out your machine and benches to minimize movement, and allow for multi-tasking, the total time taken from picking up the un-embroidered garment, to packaging the finished product, can be drastically reduced.

The central component of your setup should be your machine. You should also have two benches, one to the left, and one to the right, in a ‘U’ shaped configuration. If your machine does not come with a storage drawer for threads, these can be stored on a rack on the wall, above the left bench. Your hoops should also be stored under or above the left bench.

The worker stands centrally in the ‘U’ shape. Then it is simply a case of hooping the garment on the left bench, embroidering, and then finishing and packaging the item on the right bench. In this way, there is minimal movement, speeding up the process, and reducing worker fatigue.

By organising workspace in this way, you can increase worker speed, decrease worker fatigue, and finish jobs quicker. This means more output per machine, and more scope for taking extra orders, without compromising quality of work, or worker morale.