2004 catalog

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Marketing Moment

Follow Up For Sales

November 2004

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The Embroidery Store offers a full line of specialized embroidery scissors for every type of job. This month, these 8-inch Featherweight Blunt Point Scissors are on sale for only $9.99 a pair. Stock up now!

National Network of Embroidery Professionals

Embroidery Yellow Pages

November Web Specials

Each month, the Embroidery Store offers some great deals on the supplies you need most on its Web site at www.embstore.com. It’s a wonderful opportunity to stock up on things you use everyday at bargain prices. To order, call (800) 504-9757. These are available for the month of November only so don’t delay.

All Hoopmaster Products
15% off

TCS Tubular Clamping System
15% off

Cap Backing
3 3/4" x 250-yard roll
Regular Price $22 Sale Price $18.70
#B450300

Medium Firm Tearaway Stabilizer
14" x 20" 250 sheet per pack
Regular Price $37.70 Sale Price $29.99
#B491215

8" Featherweight Blunt Point Scissors
Regular Price $11.75 Sale Price $9.99
#B11088

Bobbin Case Size L
Regular Price $6.25 Sale Price $5.25
RY50016

Speed up your hooping and quickly place your hoop in the same place every time on the garment with the Hoopmaster, a hooping device that’s offered at a 15% discount this month at The Embroidery Store.

Product of the Month

Speed Production With
Easy-To-Use Hoopmaster

Speed up your hooping and increase your accuracy with The Hoopmaster Tubular Hooping Kit, distributed by The Embroidery Store. This system is designed to increase productivity by holding backing firmly in place while using number and letter grids to document and consistently place logos.

It consists of a HoopMaster station, a fixture in a 12 cm, 15 cm, or 18 cm size, a portable mounting base, freestyle arm, pocket guide, T-square, and demo tape. The flexible support arms hold the hoop securely in place. The pocket alignment guide makes pockets and patterned shirts easier to accurately hoop. The freestyle arm helps with hooping sleeves, cap backs, cuffs, collars, jackets, aprons, towels, bags, and youth garments.

The HoopMaster is available for Allied, Barudan, Brother, Durkee, EMS/Hooptech, Happy, Melco, SWF, and Tajima hoops. Call for available sizes.

For more information, contact The Embroidery Store at (800) 504-9757 or e-mail info@embstore.com. Visit the Web site at www.embstore.com to see the full online catalog.

Marketing Moment

Increase Your Sales With
Consistent Follow Up

By Deborah Sexton

Getting a new customer is hard work and often takes a significant investment on your part in the form of marketing and advertising dollars and the time you take putting materials together. Are you maximizing that investment? Not according to Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the Guerilla Marketing series, who says that nearly 70% of business lost in America is lost due to lack of follow-up after a sale.

Does your shop fall into this category?

According to Levinson, most businesses think once they’ve made the sale, that their job is over, when in reality it’s just beginning. Once you’ve made a customer, the only way to keep him is to shower him with attention and reminders of what you can do for him.

”People want relationships. They want the businesses they patronize to stay in contact. They want to feel cared for and not ignored. All guerrillas know that their customer relationships are their most precious assets,” says Levinson. “They know that if someone purchased from them one time and had an enjoyable purchase experience, they are likely to buy again.”

The marketing expert offers the following checklist to follow to make sure you are being proactive about keeping established business.

1. Send thank-you notes after the sale—within 48 hours.

2. Contact customers within a month of the sale to make certain they are satisfied and have no questions.

3. Contact customers three months after the sale, this time suggesting new items that may tie-in with the original purchase.

4. Three months later, make another contact.

“This kind of guerrilla follow-up not only prevents dreaded apathy from setting in, but also increases business anywhere from 20% to 300%,” says Levinson. “Remember, it costs six times more to sell something to a new prospect than to sell that same thing to an existing customer.”

Embroidery Essentials

Battling Bird’s Nests

By Helen Hart Momsen

A common problem that beginning, and sometimes even veteran, embroiderers run into is bird’s nests. This term is used to define that big ball of thread that collects under the throat plate and eventually stops your machine.

There are a variety of reasons why this happens. Oftentimes, there is not enough tension on the upper thread. This can cause the upper thread to loop and, these loops gather under the throat plate. Another common cause is too tight bobbin tensions. I always check the top ones first, however, in general, I advise against changing bobbin tension unless there is a good reason.
You also may see bird’s nests caused by improper hooping. Make sure that the fabric is hooped taut like a drum, otherwise the fabric will flag up and down with each insertion of the needle. This also will cause poor registration in your sewn design.

If you are sewing a high-density design, one with a lot of stitches, and find you are getting bird’s nests, there may be too much detail in the design for it to sew right. You may have to eliminate some of the elements or simplify them to get it to sew smoothly. Also if the design has a lot of overlapping elements, the multiple layers can cause bird’s nests to form as well.

Finally, make sure you are using the proper needle for the fabric you are sewing. If the needle is not penetrating the fabric properly because it’s not strong enough, this also can cause a bird’s nest.

To clear away a bird’s nest:
Cut any threads between the needle and the garment and try to gently remove it. If this is not sufficient, you may have to slip a long, flat knife between the goods and the throat plate and cut the thread beneath the goods. (A long, flat knife is kinder to the throat plate than angled razor blades or artist’s X-acto blades.)

Make sure the fabric has not been caught down in the hole. If it has, do not pull the garment out using force. This will compound the problem and cause the shirt to shift in the hoop, adding to your woes if you want to continue embroidering the design and save the garment.

After the garment is detached from the mass of thread, do not make the assumption that all is well. Remove the hoop (trying to keep the garment in the hoop) from the machine. Make sure all the thread is cleared out of the needle passage in the throat plate. Failure to do this can cause broken needles. Remove the needle plate and the needle and clean the area completely.

If the knife is not in the home position, push the knife until it returns to the home position. Remove the needle and perform a manual trim. Remove the bobbin case completely from its housing and make sure that there is no extra thread in the assembly.

Finish up your fix with a good polishing of the throat plate—using something like crocus cloth or cord. Scratches that build up on the throat plate can contribute to thread breaks.

Helen Hart Momsen has been in embroidery for more than 20 years. In addition to running her home-based embroidery and digitizing company, she is a regular contributor to industry trade magazines and a speaker at industry events. She also owns the Embroidery Line, www.EmbroideryLine.net, which offers professional and aspiring embroiderers with a free, uncensored forum for education and idea sharing.

This tip was extracted from her latest book, “Professional Embroidery: Stitching by Design.” (Binnacle Publishers, 2004), which covers a wide range of topics of interest to any embroiderer getting started. For more information, go to www.HelenHart.comor e-mail her at Hart@HelenHart.com.

Carolyn Weathers
Paxon Embroidery
Greenville, Mississippi
662-335-2160
cweathers@cox-internet.com

Carolyn Weathers, who runs Paxon Embroidery along with her husband, Chip, splits her time between monogramming and training others on Meistergram machines.

Paxon Embroidery specializes in offering monogramming on towels, bedspreads, napkins, and other fine linens. Co-owner Carolyn Weathers started out her business by establishing accounts with five local boutiques.

One of Paxon’s Embroidery’s most popular items are monogrammed napkins. Co-owner Carolyn Weathers has one client who has ordered more than 20 dozen of them over an 18-month period. The client thinks they make a perfect wedding gift.

Monogrammed baby bibs are big sellers in the five boutiques that Carolyn Weathers does contract monogramming for.

Customer Profile

Meistergram Veterans Stay Busy
Offering Monogramming & Training Services

By Deborah Sexton

You know you love your job, when no matter how much time you spend doing it, it’s still kind of fun. For Carolyn Weathers, co-owner, Paxton Embroidery, the more time she spends doing embroidery, the happier she is.

Weathers, a former home-economics student at the University of Mississippi, was introduced to embroidery when her sister, who lives four and a half hours away in Hattiesburg, Miss., opened a monogramming shop. Weathers would drive back and forth on the weekends to help her out with orders.

“We’d sew 15 hours at a stretch, and we did this for four or five years,” Weathers recalls. “I enjoyed it. It was like going on vacation. Finally one day, my husband said, ‘If you like it so much, you should get your own machine.’ ”

Weathers took him up on the idea, and in October of 1998, she bought a Meistergram 800. By the end of the year, it was already paid off—with no advertising or marketing.

“We approached five stores that sold the type of items that we wanted to sew: upscale linens, fine towels, nice robes, and home decorative items,” says Weathers. “They are all boutiques. We do bed spreads, linens, and lots of towels. We do it on a contract basis, other people buy them and bring them to us.” The shop gets so busy that around the holidays the boutiques are cut off Dec. 15 and walk-ins are cut off Dec. 1.

Weathers estimates that about 60% of her overall business is from walk-ins or out-of-town customers who learn about the shop through word of mouth. One regular customer from New Orleans saw some of Carolyn’s monogrammed napkins at a wedding. “She wrote me and asked if I would send her some examples. So I did a sewout of a set of initials in unusual fonts and she loved it,” says Weathers.

When the woman began planning her daughter’s wedding, she ordered monogrammed napkins, 40 towels (all the towels in the house were replaced with monogrammed versions) and10 big, fluffy bathrobes, which were gifts for the bridesmaids who were treated to a full day of beauty at a spa. Weathers estimates she’s done a total of about 20-dozen monogrammed napkins to date for this one customer. “She gives them as wedding gifts,” notes the embroiderer.

Weathers also regularly does work for a large uniform company, serving predominantly doctors and dentists. “We do all of their embroidery,” she says. “The doctors prefer Meistergram over straight stitch.”

But serving five retail boutiques, a catalog company, walk-in traffic, and the uniform company still isn’t enough for the Weathers. They also do training, service, and repair for Meistergram owners in their surrounding area. Carolyn does the training while Chip does the service and repair. This takes them away from the shop, but Carolyn compensates by working harder to get things out ahead of time. Also, “I have a person here who can do anything,” she says.

Because Weathers runs her own shop, she’s able to offer her training clients advice on much more than just how to run the machine. For example, she recommends limiting font choices to between eight and 10 styles. “I won’t leave my notebooks with my fonts at a store, and I will not do samples unless I have to,” she says. For walk-in customers, she sets up the monogram and lets them look at it, and she’ll show them examples of things monogrammed to give customers a good idea of what the finished product will look like.

“If you give a customer too many font choices, the orders can get a little messy,” she says. If a customer wants something different, she will show them some additional options or for her retail clients, she faxes over other type styles.

Going into their seventh year in business, life is good for the Weathers, who have all the work they can handle and are quite content with the mix they have between sewing, traveling, and training. Their biggest plans for the future are just keeping things status quo and enjoying the reputation they’ve established.

Get ready for the limitless sales opportunities you can take advantage of with this 20-piece package of Meistergram Christmas stock designs.

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Design of the Month

Deck The Halls With
Christmas Stock Designs

It’s that time of the year again when businesses are gearing up for their busiest seasons. Retail shops are looking for personalized gifts to sell; employers are looking for tokens of appreciation for their staff and best customers; and schools, churches, and other organizations are holding festivals and parties and may have a need for embroidered aprons, shirts, and caps.

Capitalize on these opportunities with a nice selection of Meistergram stock Christmas designs that will allow you to cater to all these needs. Red and green hand towels can be dressed up with Christmas trees, candy canes, or stars and make a great retail item or gift. Pot holders, tree skirts, and stockings are other ideal items to dress up with a Christmas design.

Put together a flier of Christmas ideas for your customers imposing any one of these classic Christmas symbols over a sweat shirt, an apron, or even a throw blanket to give busy people looking for ideas some ways to make use of your embroidered products.

The Christmas package features 20 Meistergram designs including a Santa head, snowman, holly, Christmas tree, candy canes, gingerbread man, Christmas lights, and many more. These hard-to-find predigitized designs are part of a full collection of more than 1,000 images offered by The Embroidery Store in all commercial and home formats. Designs also are available individually. To order, simply call the toll-free number, e-mail, or visit the Web site.

The Embroidery Store now offers a full line of more than 1,000 stock embroidery designs for Meistergram machines. These hard-to-find predigitized designs are offered individually or in packages for cost savings. To order, simply call the toll-free number, e-mail, or visit the Web site at http://www.embstore.com.