Traditionally the contract embroidery world in the northeast is dead in late winter because its only local business.  Our seasons haven't changed in 4-5 months and there are very few company events in March!  March in boston is a depressing month because we are all waiting for spring, the snow is gone yet its still cold out which prevents even the hardiest from enjoying outside activities. So, March has always been the month when we question the coming year, invent marketing ploys (free digitizing for orders over a 100 and free pick-up from NES...for contract embroidery) that inevitably fail because there is no business to be had, and we suspend production shifts which is the worst.  This year is different though.  With a heavy marketing push and our design center online, we're as busy as the middle of may fulfilling orders around the country.  Most of our new customers are from california, the mid-atlantic and florida where their Spring is in full swing! 

Such is the life of a small business trying to push the envelope with better (and more defensable) technology then any larger competitor and/or VC financed upstarts. CafePress was spawned because of the new direct garment printer that Brother and T-Jet invented.  leverage the technology for screenprinting someone else invented and hype it until they go public, then fade away on the backs of small retail investors.  such is the game of Venture Capital.

Anyway, i'm getting off the subject, cafePress, Zazzle, customink and spreadshirt are 'hot' right now in the screenprint world because they have gobs of money to spend on being hot.  There should be 200 of these businesses in the next year with better design studios and stores with great features because of the direct garment printers.  unfortunately....but fortunate for us, no one will break the embroidery barrier because its not a direct art-to-art transfer.  We've (really chris) developed a direct embroidery studio (so folks can design the final product) and I don't imagine anyone will catch up fast.  We'll have our hot run soon when the leads from distributor/content partners and the orders will pour in.  Also, folks will soon realize that embroidering 300k hats overseas is a waste and they seek just-in-time production state-side..

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……

As an embroidery guy, I've always hated screenprinted t-shirts but i'm starting to love 'em!  We had seen a new screenprinting machine at the ISS show in long beach in late january and got pretty darn excited but were still a little sceptical until today.  We figured that the machine was tuned for a trade show and they picked the art they were printing especially for the strengths of the machine but we found out today that the machine is for real.

To give you a little back-story:  Screenprinting has always been a dirty business (especially compared to custom embroidery) because of what's involved in every run.  It's just like you remember from shop class in 7th grade:  you need to seperate the art into distinct colors and burn a screen for each.  (please forgive my crude explanation but again i never really was interested in understanding it).  Then you need to mix the ink to match the color you want and squeegee (sp?) each color onto each shirt.  most of the time (depending on the ink) you must cure the ink before you put another color on to prevent bleeding.  then you need to put the shirt through a dryer for complete curing......AND then clean out the screen with chemicals that you can't just dump down the drain.  As i said earlier, it's really messy and a pain in the butt for any run smaller then 100 units.  Most large (and better) screenprinters run thousands of shirts at a time but that means you need to order 1,000 at a time which is expensive and risky.  NOW, Brother has introduced a printer that will print t-shirts in full color just like an ink jet printer....in seconds!  no screens, no art seperation, no ink mixing, no chemicals and, most important, no set-up for each run.  you can print a custom shirt every time....and just from a regular desktop computer. 

now i'm a huge fan of screenprinting (eventhough as mark pointed out, "it's technically not screenprinting anymore") because the new machines not only let you run small runs but it can be run in an embroidery shop like ours without the BIG MESS it would have created a year ago.

I went to the the schwag olympics this weekend: The Daytona 500!  You have never seen more embroidered and screenprinted apparel in your life.  There were likely 50-100 18-wheelers selling apparel items for their respective drivers.  I noticed that one of the Dale Earnhart, Jr. trailers had 10 lines 20 people deep to purchase apparel (extremely overpriced) with the number 8.  I could not find a trailer without a 20 minute line.  And this was just on sunday; they've had these trailers open for an entire week of racing.  There were only 250,000 fans at the race on sunday and I could not find anyone without a garment embroidered or screenprinted with 'their' driver.  Affinity marketing has reached its pinnacle at Nascar events like the Daytona 500 and really bodes well for affinity marketing in other sports. With Nascar, they obviously have such a huge following that they can easily purchase apparel in bulk for sale at these events but folks in amateur sports have no resource to order one hat displaying their affinity to 'their' driver or baseball player, tennis player, soccer player, etc. 

Folks also buy brands because of their personal affinity to the fashion that a brand represents.  People buy Polo, Nike, Patagonia, etc. because they associate themselves with the image that brand represents.  Sure, lots of folks buy for function but when it really comes down to it, they buy into brands.  With the internet, faster production and lower minimums brands have proliferated in the past year.  We saw 100's of new brands at the Imprinted sportswear show....granted a lot of them were riding the 'performance apparel' wave (garments with 100% polyester like under armor and other wicking garments) as well as the 'fashion' t-shirt business like american apparel.  But, I feel brands will continue to explode when anyone can create and sell their 'own' brand online with CorporateCasuals.com (the only one providing embroidered apparel), cafePress.com, Zazzle.com, spreadshirt.com and several others. We're excited to drive this new 'your' brand revolution.  This way anyone interested in launching a brand may do so without set-up and inventory costs.  Now, you don't need any money to launch your own brand.  You could be the next Life is Good brand with the online tools and one-unit production capacity that we offer aspiring fashion entrepreneurs.

Maybe that's a little harsh but it's a blanket statement just like anyone who claims they can auto-digitize anything.  In my opinion, there will never be "auto-digitizing" for every design thus never an automatic/machine/software way to turn art into custom embroidery on a large scale.....at least with good quality ;)

Bill and I talked about this last night.  Some of our digitizers (outsourced primarily) try to take an auto-digitizing approach to creating designs which is where the real problem lies.  Folks think vector art, because it contains "blocks", can be converted into anything design oriented. But in embroidery we're actually stitching through the garment and using stitches to create the art....you can't use art to dictate stitching in every design.   there are too many variables and the primary reason is that when these 'blocks' are shrunk or expanded beyond their expected use stitch types need to change.  you can't run a 'satin stitch' wider than 5 millimeters but if a line in the design is stretched beyond 5mm wide, you need to switch to a fill stitch and software can't accommodate this in every design. In addition, we regularly change proportions of a design slightly to highlight detail sections and lower the open blank area.  This reduces stitch count which costs less and designs look better at their appropriate density AND gives us more area to stitch the detail portions of the logo which tends to be the focus of the design.  Let me explain with the pictures on monday....

Yesterday was an advertising and product day.  We launched our Free Custom Hat Offer on the blog Valleywag.com which is part of gawker media.  These are very popular blogs on the west coast and in new york city, so we hope to create a little buzz!  I don't think the ad will show until tomorrow but we're hoping this will give us some word of mouth advertising.  We're getting some traction advertising on cafepress.com and chris split out some of the best converting cpc keywords into their own campaign.  Second, I looked into Public Relations and contacted a friend for a resource in the local area.  With the Free hat offer, I feel one well placed news story about it would give this program a huge boost.  We'll see if we can find someone local to help us really get the free hat offer out to the public. 

Then the Patagonia rep Andy came by to show us the spring '06 product line.  Great products as usual but the new news was their committment to stocking popular styles.  Patagonia is used to selling to typical outdoor retailers which means they have stock six months before the season starts. the retailers place a large, mixed order and wait 3-4 months for delivery.  With their direct catalog and interent business they have been stocking more and more product each year.  Now Andy has come on and secured a more corporate type inventory: a bunch of styles, few colors, many sizes and lots of units in each.  What does this mean for us and our customers?  This year we will be able to offer more Patagonia styles then ever before because we know they'll have the stock and folks to help us pushy corporate folks.  Patagonia is my favorite brand (as everyone knows all too well at our shop) and I'm thrilled we can offer more of it in 2006.  Our customers can always be sure of Patagonia's quality.  Unlike the big brands like ralph lauren, they do not license their name to other manufacturers (which creates top of the line polo on madison ave. and cheap polo you find at sears discounted 30%) so you can always be sure you're getting retail patagonia quality!  Anyway, more to do today.  be back soon.

Just read an article in the Wall Street Journal about online printers like VistaPrint and iPrint.  Funny thing is not only do they provide small businesses with custom products like we do but we worked with both of these companies (advertising on VistaPrint and as a vendor for iPrint).  iPrint is a stalwart from the dot-com days that a guy named royal farros started.  It went public and was the hottest thing since slice bread back in the ya ya '90s.  Vistaprint is a newer iPrint.  iPrint had an online design center (like ours for custom embroidery) but it took 25 screens to complete an order (granted it was developed a while back) and VistaPrint has the one screen design center (more like our embroidery studio).  Vistaprint went public a few months back and is the hottest thing in the re-birth of online commerce.  Anyway, it got me thinking how similar their business was to custom embroidery and how we can leverage our online design technology to be even better then the branders.com, starbelly or ecompanystore.com of yesteryear.  It can't be hard.  these guys barely got off the ground and never really had any real customer self-service or automation technology(like iPrint did).  they said they were going to build it but it never came.  Not that we strive to jump on the new ecommerce funding band-wagon and go public in 3-4 years but its just an interesting parallel.

Anyway, as a curious person, i jumped on the computer while watching the olympics (remember, everyone's got to cheer for emily cook...see past post) and typed royal farros into google.  Magically, i found royal's own blog and one of his friend brad feld.  Royal's blog didn't include any contact info so i emailed brad feld and boom, in what seemed like three seconds he replied with Royal's email cc'd.  then ten seconds later royal wrote me as well!  it was amazing!  I tried to reply back as quickly as possible asking if he had any insight as to how we could market custom embroidered apparel and our online design center effectively.  I haven't heard back yet but was really thrilled to have a chance to ask him a question. WOW!