OK, I've blabbed on and on about our business in a marketing and development sense but haven't added insight into how we actually produce and ship orders. this really is the fun part eventhough i don't mention it much. Once an order is placed the real experts take over! line items for all orders are compiled electronically for mark to review and order. Mark is operations-central. he places all orders (sometimes with dozens of vendors) and splits them for production. with just a little technology help (and more on its way) he can process this intense detail work for what could be a hundred orders a day plus dozens of high unit offline orders. He also takes care of all stock logo orders start-to-finish.

For custom digitized logos, Bill now manages (instead of digitizes these days) all designs through the manual process of getting each design digitized to perfection. He's been digitizing for more than 25 years and can spot, fix, repair any logo in minutes. In the old days he worked for ed carey (sp?...sorry ed) as a digitizer when digitizing was in it's heyday. We were actually reminiscing about this the other day: they used to charge $25-35 per thousand stitches (a lot!) and turn designs around in 3 weeks (forever!...in anyone’s book). Incredible to think about these days. Anyway, bill manages, fixes and runs a few dozen custom designs a day, reviews a stock designs and then gets them out into production (a lot).

He’s got some pretty cool custom technology too.  For the stock designs, he reviews the compiled design (automatically done with technology) and can edit the lettering and designs. The interesting part is that once he edits the lettering or design once, it saves the change permanently for that letter in that size. Most embroiderers use “keyboard” lettering for text. These fonts are based on vector art in blocks and then stitched out once the size is determined. Thus, these blocks need to accommodate letters from ¼” to 3” but these should be digitized differently because density and curning changes with each size change. It’s hard to explain…sorry. Anyway, the benefit is we offer custom digitized letters (that look much better) instead of just keyboard lettering for all our designs. This technology thrills even bill! He can now make a system-wide change to letters and he never has to make the change again. Great quality lettering that will always be great….a production person’s dream. Now on to production……which will need to be continued……