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!

Satisfaction!....or in our case some advertising.  It's unbelievable!  No wonder google's stock/profit keeps rising.  Granted, we're a small company right now but we've got the only online design center for embroidery and that's 1/3 of the market that Zazzle, Spreadshirt and Customink are going after.

I've been researching and emailing for weeks trying to find some relevent place we can advertise but haven't had any luck.  I just got a response from Spreadshirt.com that they declined our ad.  Spreadshirt offers banner advertising in-house and text ads through adbrite.com that anyone can purchase.  But, even with the most comparable product they could advertise, we were rejected.  Bummer.  I can understand.  Maybe they want to go into embroidery, maybe they don't want folks to think they're partnering with us or they feel we offer a competitive product.  Just too bad we couldn't find out why and at least open a dialog.

I also contacted Zazzle.com to see if we could advertise our offer of custom embroidered apparel but they're not interested.  I guess i need to try CafePress.com next!  Anyway, we're trying to get out our free custom hat offer out and not having much luck.  So, if you know anyone with a small business or community based content site that would like to sell advertising (without a $10,000 for the first order like Facebook.com) please have them email me at andrew@corporatecasuals.com!  thanks!

We've tried other avenues as well. I got the cold shoulder from Staples after the ad was approved and ready to run the next day! Cindy L' ecuyer emailed me that they have some super-secret deal with Awards.com and can't run our ad (again, we were happy to pay for it).  Awards.com is an online promotional products dealer waay top-heavy with fancy names on their management team and big bucks to blow.  They filed a $900 million suit against Kinkos after they severed a deal to give Awards.com space in each kinkos.  Maybe they'll only sue Staples for a 1/2 billion after someone gets smart and nixes their deal.

I also emailed a few PR firms but haven't got a reply.  So, if you know anyone in PR that deals with small companies we're interested! We're offering a Free custom Embroidered hat to anyone willing to pay $5.99 for S+H.  I can't think of a small business or group that wouldn't give us a try...so our only problem is getting the word out!  Thus we'd welcome any Satisfaction in advertising or PR!

Just a week after we launched our Your free custom embroidered hat offer we finished setting up our affiliate program with shareasale.com.

Our free embroidered hat offer is an amazing campaign that allows anyone to design and order a free hat embroidered with their custom logo.  I feel our toughest battle may be convincing folks that there is NO Catch!  Use our online design center to create your logo, saying, slogan, team name or anything else.  Surprise us!  We find that folks are creating designs and sayings we never would have thought of when we designed our online embroidery design center.  create a hat for an athelete you support in the olympics in Torino!  We received an order for 15 hats earlier this week for "Team Emily, Torino 2006" embroidered along with the american flag.  I couldn't resist emailing the customer to see which athlete they were cheering for.  She wrote me back late last night.  They are supporting US freestyle skier named Emily cook (www.emilycook.com).  check out her website and cheer along with us for her.  best of luck emily!

We also finished setting up our affiliate program with ShareASale.com and excited to sign up affiliates to advertise our free custom embroidered hat!  If you know someone with a content site that's interested in advertising this offer and get 10% on re-orders, please have them visit corporate casuals or shareasale.com.  I need to run now; i have a little friend at home that needs a diaper change!  thanks for reading, andrew

Oh my goodness, a custom embroidery blog! I worry blogging has almost become a cliche and I'm just piling on...but in our archaic industry, it may be a welcome relief. ALTHOUGH, i do like to blab about business or embroidery to anyone who will listen for hours and hours.....BUT that's what blogging is meant for, right?!?!.

Anyway, although I've been working in the custom embroidery business for almost 12 years (wow that's scary), I've actively been involved in it since I was 10 years old when my mother, Dicksie Callen, started Callenstitch in our basement in Amherst, NH to service the burgeoning monogramming business.  She serviced companies like Carroll Reed, Jordan Marsh and Macy's with monogramming services on their towels, sweaters and woven shirts.  We moved to Concord, MA in 1985 and she got promoted upstairs to the play-room.  Then in 1993 she decided to sell the business and become a physical therapist but couldn't find a buyer.  I was in Aruba setting up a windsurfing shop when she called me in march 1994.  She told me she couldn't sell the business and was going to auction off the machinery unless I wanted to give it "a go".  I said I'd be home by the end of the week.

Once home, my father informed me that when it was my mother's business it could be in the house but since i was going to run it, goodbye free rent!  So, while i set up a crude database and answered phones, I also hunted for commercial space.  Once in our new shop in Acton, MA I went selling.  I thought i must be the best salesman ever cause everyone i saw wanted to do business with us. What I didn't realize was that my mother had created a great brand for herself over 13 years and any idiot could sell her good name.  Nevertheless, we were swamped and I had two phones going, was hiring production folks, buying new machines, etc.....BUT every time something screwed up on the floor i was calling my mother for help.  Coincidentally, she was finding out that working in health care for multiple managers wasn’t for her.  After 6 months or so she returned to “the floor” and I applied for business school.  I still did all the sales calls; in fact, one professor lowered my grade because I missed a class while presenting to our largest customer named CYRK!!!...i guess they can’t take academics completely out of ‘business school’ but this was crazy. Throughout my second year at Babson I began having grander thoughts of working in investment banking or consulting like every other b-school grad but after one interview my uncle set up for me on the junk bond desk at citigroup, I knew it wasn’t for me.  I wasn't good at 'sucking up' and it seemed that i wouldn't get far without that 'skill set'.  Anyway, I returned to the custom embroidery business shortly after I graduated from Babson.  Then we began to grow again mostly because this was late 1997 and the YA-YA 90's were just starting to heat up.  I was selling to all kinds of promotional product companies like Adventures in Advertising where I conducted tours through our facility explaining the fine art of embroidery and how to sell it.  Then a year or two later I realized that no matter how hard i tried I couldn't sell contract embroidery outside new england.  For some bizarre reason everyone thought they needed a 'local' embroiderer and I was done trying to convince them it didn't matter where your embroiderer was.

SO, that's when i came up with the idea for Corporate Casuals...Custom Embroidered Apparel--DIRECT.  Not a novel idea in those days cause everyone was riding the DOT-COM boom.  A friend of mine named Travis Warren had just launched his web development company Whipplehill with Peter Batchelder and agreed to put up our first website for little $$'s so they could build a portfolio.  Then I started writing a business plan and sending it out. no VCs were interested except a couple (i forget their names now). Only person who was really interested was a guy by the name of Walt Petersen from a company named Austin James (they sold the software program where you can create your own Iron-on design).  Turns out he was interested cause they were just about to launch Madetoorder.com and rake in $25-50m in vc money.  Branders.com and Starbelly.com got a ton of money too.  They all blew it and Starbelly even put HALO (a $600m promotional products company) out of business. Then I came up with a novel twist i thought.  We were going to create private label, online stores for companies and organizations for free.  This way they could jump on the ecommerce bandwagon (without actually doing anything) and we could get a foothold into their company provide all their corporate apparel needs.  Remember, Fidelity was buying millions in embroidered apparel each year and so were all the other mutual funds that are based here in boston.  So, I started marketing that and poured into landing these big clients while also running a contract embroidery shop.  I hired a family friend and then a sales guy...they were both a disaster.

Anyway, we had a good idea and a great web developer named jeff Kody building the framework for creating and running hundreds of online stores off of one platform.  Only problem was the customer.  most were very sceptical and all needed more convincing then anyone could handle.  Even through incedible contacts, folks said no cause they couldn't believe it was free.  Ecompanystore got $30+m in vc to do the same thing and failed. 

Then re-birth #4: we hired a great account exec named Kristen and I started buying keywords on google.  The phones started ringing and things picked up.  We created a new main site and plugged away.  Finally adding Cathy Davis (she's great too!) as another account exec.

Another year passed and then VistaPrint!  vistaprint.com was offering printed products to small businesses online with a design studio.  I knew we could copy the model for embroidery!  So i emailed Jeff Kody to see if he was interested in helping build a design studio.  He was but had just taken a new job and was off the market but he knew a friend that may be interested, chris haynes.  chris had worked in the industry for many years and for some hot companies.  he was interested...but took another job....bummer.....BUT then emailed me back a few months later that it wasn't working out.  Great for us.

Then we started mapping out the embroidery studio and found customink.com.  their design center for screen-printed apparel was just what we wanted but for embroidery.  You could design stuff on customink that could never be embroidered.  Plus customink only offered one color designs!  We wanted multi-color embroidery designs and an embroiderable file to come through with the order.  Chris suggested we work with the raw designs instead of just depicting them online.  I doubted it was possible and that’s when I pressed his buttons:  he loved to hear it couldn’t be done cause that just made it more challenging and valuable in the end.  He began dissecting Tajima files and a few short months later we launched the design center without a peep.  I think folks are still skeptical that you can order online without set-up charges and no minimums but thankfully Zazzle.com, SpreadShirt.com, CafePress and a few others pioneered the no minimum custom order theory.  So, we think it'll catch on.

Embroidery can sometimes be an oxymoron combining custom embroidery and production.  Folks at work have heard me say this a thousand times but its true.  the words don't work together (custom and production) and traditionally in business they have never worked on a large scale.  We hope to change that…at least for the custom embroidery business.