Probably once a day we get asked the question by a customer if we will embroider their logo onto an item they will send to us. It is easy to understand why that question comes up. Sometimes people have or purchase something and would like to have their logo embroidered on it.
In other cases, a business owner finds a great deal on some golf polo shirts that he wants to use as uniforms for his employees. So he inquires about sending us the shirts and to embroider their logo onto them.
Most custom embroider shops do not do this type of work. And in general, we do not embroider onto items provided to us from customers. There are a number of reasons why.
Probably one of the best examples I heard as an explanation of why embroidery shops generally don’t embroider onto items purchased from them came from a seminar I attended a few years ago. The teacher made this analogy. “Asking you to embroider onto an item a customer brings to you is like taking your own steak into a restaurant and asking them to cook it for you.” That is absolutely correct.
Part of the value we at Customized Guys provide is to choose items that we know will embroider well and give your organization the kind of image it needs to succeed.
It also is very difficult to make any money embroidering logos onto items not purchased from us. The money is in the steak, not the cooking of it.
Second, in the embroidery process the machines are going to punch thousands of holes at a high rate of speed into items in order to create the embroidered image. On rare occasion, the embroidery machine can “eat” an item and destroy it. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.
If our embroidery machine eats your $50 golf shirt that you are paying us maybe $10 to embroider onto, do you think I am going to replace the golf shirt? No, that math doesn’t work.
But if the embroidery machine destroys a shirt you purchased from us and we can replace it at a wholesale cost, that math works. And 9 times out of 10, you don’t even know that happened.
In addition, the construction of an item provided to us for embroidery may not be conducive to good embroidery. For example, there are jackets with pockets in places where we would normally embroider a logo. If we are going to embroider it, we probably sew the pocket shut rendering it useless.
It’s not to say we have never done this, we have. There are situations where it makes sense for us embroider onto items not purchased from us. Those situations are the exception, not the rule. If you think you have one of those situations, please feel to contact us and ask. If we can’t do it, we will tell you right up front.