Your Embroidered Logo: Customer Provided Garments

While some embroiderers accept customer-provided items, many embroiderers prefer to embroider garments that they purchased. Why is that? Are they concerned about loosing the profit they would gain from selling the garments? Maybe. But, there are other concerns when embroidering clothing that wasn’t designed to be embroidered.  

Apparel that wasn’t made to be decorated may have pockets in places that make the garment hard to stabilize for embroidery.  Sometimes the material is less flexible and therefore more likely to break a needle. The quality of the item may be so poor that it has a negative effect on the embroidery. The item may be too difficult to hoop or have wrinkles which must be pressed out before it is decorated. 

Another concern is the chance of damage to the apparel during the embroidery process.  This rarely happens but its possible. If a garment purchased by the embroiderer is ruined, the decorator will replace the item without any cost to their customer. But, when a customer’s item is damaged, the embroider may or may not replace the item depending on their damage policy.

Your Embroidered Logo: What Designs Work Best for Embroidered Baseball Caps?

What type of logo works best for embroidered baseball-style hats? A simple, horizontally-orientated design where the business name is the primary focus and there isn't any small detail. If your left chest logo is detailed or vertically-orientated you may need to simplify or rearrange it so it works well for hats.

Sometimes additional design elements such as tagline text or an image can be embroidered on the back of a cap but then you have to avoid hat styles with a mesh back. If you must include small text on the front it will look better if it's not located next to the brim because that area is more difficult to embroider so the text may not look as readable.

Your Embroidered Logo: Looking for New Ideas?

 Consider these design ideas when creating your new logo:

• Use a mix of unexpected colors. Experiment with new shades such as warm greens, oranges, and orange-reds or cool greens mixed with different shades of aqua. 
• Place some text on a slant.  Just make sure the remaining elements in your logo give your design an overall balanced look.
• Use gold for a thread color.
• Create your entire design around a short URL name. If it consists of two or three words consider having each word in a different color, size or font for easy readability.
• Interlock or overlay one or two design elements to create a more unified appearance.

Your Embroidered Logo: Simplify Colors!

Simple is best for embroidered logos! Keep the number of colors in your design to a minimum. Multi-color designs can lose their distinctiveness and finding a garment color that contrasts with every color in the logo can be more difficult. Single-color designs can be especially easy to work with. Many businesses use one bold thread color such as a shade of red or blue and have this single-color logo embroidered on a variety of shirt colors. Other groups vary their logo color depending on whether the garment is light or dark with dark apparel embroidered in white thread and light items embroidered in black or navy-colored thread. 

Your Embroidered Logo: What Doesn't Work Well?

While a well-designed and executed embroidered logo can look great, not every printed design translates well into embroidery. What doesn't work well for an embroidered design? 

• Small, isolated objects such as a group of tiny stars separated by space. Why? Very small objects or areas of thread can look 'lost' on their own. 
• Outlining of text with a narrow outline. It's doable but often looks messy because it's hard to correctly place an outline when dealing with thread and fabric. Areas such as the inside of letters can look muddy. Text usually has a cleaner look when outlines are avoided although eliminating an outline can affect how well the color of the text contrasts with the background or garment color.
• Lots of small text. One to four words of small text can work as long as it's divided into two lines but additional wording is too much for a small embroidered design. 
• Small negative areas where the garment color shows through the design. Negative areas can lose their shape especially when they are small. These areas must be embroidered in a thread color that matches the garment color to maintain their correct appearance. Dark thread colors like black are easier to match to the garment color while lighter shades can be more difficult.

Your Embroidered Logo: Color Limitations?

Most commercial embroidery machines have fifteen needles so fifteen different colors can be used in a design. While many logos have one to four colors, some designs have over fifteen colors. These designs are doable but they require stopping the machine additional times for rethreading which adds to the running time and cost of the logo. What are your options? Consider limiting the number of colors in your design. Often, a neutral color will work in more than one area, especially if the area is very small.

Your Embroidered Logo: Recreate an Existing Design

Need to recreate an existing embroidered design but you don't have the original digitized file?

If you have your artwork file that's a good start. In addition, you'll need to measure your existing design and take a closeup, overhead photo of it. This photo will give additional information such as what stitch types were used, spacing, and other modifications that may have been made when adapting your artwork into an embroidered design.

What if you don't have the right artwork? You can use what you have or your photo to have vector artwork created.  Once you have your vectorized file, proof it carefully. In addition to checking the elements of your design, make sure the colors are correct, especially since colors can appear to be very different online. If you're unsure about the colors, request an embroidered sample.