Dirty little secret in the embroidery industry (and it works) is companies will offer "free digitizing" to get your business but they won't give up the file if you want to switch vendors.

We have never subscribed to this trap and charge customers for digitizing.  We do offer free digitizing for larger orders on a case-by-case basis but also allow these folks to download their digitized embroidery file for use with another embroiderer.  Granted, since we charge for digitizing, we don't have to 'bake' it in to the cost of the garments and can offer cheaper prices per unit.  So it is in our best interest to eliminate 'switching' costs for every customer.

We hope lowering the initial digitizing charge to $35 and eliminating switching costs forever will give customers options and most importantly establish trust.   

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. 

I had the opportunity to go to a very cool event put on by Highland Capital Partners yesterday on businesses changing or starting out with new business models on selling.  The basic premise was software companies eliminating outside sales forces for inside sales or raving customer service.  The companies changing their businesses were primarily in enterprise software.  The founder at Trilogy is now acquiring companies for cents on the dollars with good technology and then firing the entire sales team.  He estimates all of the legacy sales teams are losing money on every sale.  So, he has focused on existing customers to improve their experience and renew contracts interacting only with inside sales reps that are more efficient (one location and better tools), more knowledgeable(training and expertise on site) and cost less (at the least, they save the travel and expenses!).

The companies that are starting out as Sales 2.0 organizations were FreshBooks and Constant Contact.  Their stories are well documented and copied in a lot of industries.  They offer a great simple service for small businesses, they market extremely efficiently with tons of data and have recurring revenue models (that help it all make financial sense).  Adding in a creative approach and focus on satisfaction they are both doing incredibly well.

So, lots of great stories and insight into what works for other industries but unfortunately hard to transfer to the embroidery and screen printing industry except one overriding theme......happy and even raving customers are the key success to any business.

Joe from Trilogy mentioned that with one company they bought; 90% of their customers 'hated' the company......and they only survived through contracts and basically trapping their customers.  treating a customer as an adversary or someone you trap is luckily a thing of the past.  Making customer sooo happy they refer you is the next challenge.

In that regard, starting the day after christmas we will offer $35 custom digitizing for any left chest (normal) size logo.  Some folks offer custom embroidered digitizing for Free but we'll let you download it and take it to any vendor you like.....thus eliminating forever the inherent "trap" in the embroidery business and eliminating switching costs.