Developing a portfolio of your work is a must! It allows your customer to see the quality of your embroidery. It also allows you to show-off some of your existing accounts. “Name-dropping” can be effective when promoting your business.

Yesterday I discussed whether it was worth the time and effort to attempt to pick out thread when you sew something incorrectly.  In many cases the answer is not, but there are cases when it becomes necessary to attempt a repair, which leads to the question: Can you really fix a sewing mistake and maintain the proper level of quality?

Managing costs is an integral part of running a successful embroidery enterprise, or any business for that matter. But you must ensure that your decisions make good financial sense, by always taking a close look at the situation and thinking it through before acting on it.

No doubt about it, metallic thread can be a challenge to deal with. If you haven’t tried it yet, you need to just so you can better appreciate how tough some aspects of embroidery really can be..

Do you charge your customer for sample sew-outs of his design? After-all, it takes almost as much time to produce a sew-out as it does to produce the final product.

How do you handle RUSH orders? Do you charge extra for this? Rush orders cost you more to produce, so it’s only logical that you pass this additional cost on to the customer. Surprisingly, many Embroiderers don’t, their thinking being that a rush order is just good customer service.

You can never learn enough when it comes to running a business. And the more you learn, the more you can earn (sounds good anyway). Thus, education should be an important part of your growth strategy...

I travel a lot and meet embroiderers all over the country through seminars, trade shows and consulting opportunities. It seems like everyone has a story of some kind, good and bad. As much as we all want to be successful, not all of us are.

Commercial embroidery is a really unique business to be in because it has so many opportunities for creative entrepreneurs. So many other businesses are in a “box,” meaning they're very structured and somewhat limited in scope.

My favorite industry event is just around the corner – the National Network of Embroidery Professionals' annual NETWORK show, is billed as a "Conference, Trade Show and Garage Sale." But none of those terms really captures the heart of the event...

I've been given the privilege of hosting a blog for Stitches, which means I get to run my mouth (fingers) about whatever I want to – or something like that.