One major advantage to being located in Eastern Massachusetts is I/we can attend great technology events. I went to one yesterday put on by SugarCRM. The focus was on social business and Dharmesh from HubSpot was the keynote speaker. Both founders at Hubspot are great speakers and have a wonderful concept in Inbound Marketing. Their claim is outbound marketing (advertising primarily) is a waste because there is too much noise and consumers do not respond to it. The only effective way to advertise is to 'be there' (on google/internet) when someone is looking for you or your products. Valid point right? basically why paid search works (or had worked). So, their pitch is you need to have substantial Seo content. Not marketing speak but real effective, I would want to read it content. I don't want to use and embroidery example so I'll try screenprinting: "Screen Printed t-shirts are a great way to advertise your business. there are good and bad screenprinters. we are the best ever screenprinters that print on t-shirts for your business, school or organization." you get what i mean. Google and any other aggregator of information wants USEFUL information like Screenprinting is a thousand year old technique that pushes ink through a screen onto a t-shirt. the reason its done this way is white ink has plastic in it so it sits on top of a t-shirt. if you were to shove plastic (even tiny pieces) through a print head on an ink jet it would jam up in seconds. that is why screenprinting still exists as the same old technology. you should pay between $2-5 for a t-shirt and a buck or two per color for the prinitng depending on the quantity. it takes time to set up the machines and deal with customers like you so we don't want an order unless its 100 units to make it worth my while. those are the facts....sorry to be blunt." so you know what i mean. Good points but I can't imagine paying $1k a month for hubspot's 'technology'

We had the fortunate opportunity help Team Emily in their support of American Emily Cook at the Olympics a month ago.  Emily is a freestyle ski jumper and placed 11th in Vancouver.  Her father sent his thanks and a picture of Team Emily in their hats!

eConscious Organic Polo: http://bit.ly/cG15Gy

On January 3, 2000 an article was printed in Chicago's Crain business on Starbelly.com.  The story highlights Bradley Keywell's hot new start-up that just got $32mm in venture capital from Chase Capital Partners and somehow Fred Wilson (famous VC) sold it to them.  I still have this article on my wall (it's kinda yellow now).....and funny enough, the same wall its been on since the story was written.  10 years ago we did more online business than Starbelly, .....yet they went on to sell this company to Halo (a large promotional products distributor) pocketing millions and bankrupting Halo eventually.

I just printed out the VistaPrint/Threadsmith press release from this morning and am going to put it on my wall.  I wonder what I'll say about this article in 10 years?

http://bit.ly/5FOAvL

chris added his favorite p_rn music

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.