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Embroiderer’s Pet Peeves

4/27/2017 | Jennifer Cox, Needle Points

Every day there are things that happen that annoy us, day after day. Here at NNEP, we are in a unique position to hear about what annoys embroidery professionals from all over the country, from owners of part time businesses at home all the way up through owners of 400+ embroidery head shops. The most surprising thing is that the concerns we gripe about are surprisingly consistent, no matter what kind or size of business it is!

Here’s a list of the top three pet peeves of embroidery and apparel decoration business owners, and some suggestions about how you can tweak your process, even just a little bit, to reduce or eliminate these frustrations for your embroidery partners.

1) Just Make It Look Good

We hear this exact phrase from our customers far too many times. This ranks at the top of the list of pet peeves because it leaves us hanging. You are asking us to read your minds, or worse, the minds of your customers to what their expectations are and somehow translate that to thread and fibers. The way to get the information we need to meet and exceed their expectations is to ask questions. In our embroidery business, we finally posted a sign in our sales area that our staff and our customers could see:

JUST MAKE IT LOOK GOOD

To “JMILG,” we need the following information:

• What product? Style, size, color, quantity

• What design?

• Where does the design go?

• What size is the design?

• Thread/Applique Colors?

• When do you need it?

We cannot begin the order until we have all the information! If we have to guess, and you are not pleased with the result, there are no refunds.

All JMILG orders must be paid, in advance, in full.

Once we knew we had all information that was required to successfully meet the customer’s expectations, it was not that hard to get customers to answer these specific questions. It was simply a matter of getting them to think about it for a moment. Your contract embroiderer needs all these same details to produce the order for your customer.

Ask your contract shop what the cost would be for them to create a binder for you to keep with examples of their six most popular fonts embroidered on fabric and presented in sheet protectors. Create each “page” with one line of text in each of the following sizes: ¼", ½", ¾", 1", 2" and 3".

You can also include a few pages of sewouts of different sizes and shapes of left chest designs, from rather small designs up through a few oversized designs. Customers often request a design size that runs on the larger side, which increases their costs and does not always look that good. Having samples to demonstrate just how big a 5" logo is can help you make sure your customers will be happy with the final product.

When a customer is sure they want a larger design on the left or right chest location of a shirt or jacket, the “business card trick” is be very effective for establishing the ideal size of the design. If the customer is wearing a design on their shirt (ANY left chest design), ask them to hold up their business card over the design. If they are not wearing a shirt with a left chest design, may you or someone on your staff always (hint you and they should be!). Most of the time, the card will cover the majority of the design, and it looks “right” on the shirt – not too small, not too large. You and the customer can now agree that a left chest design should fall in the 2½” x 3” range, depending on the proportions of the shape of the design.

2) Last Minute Michael

The next most common pet peeve is when you or your customers leave things to the last minute or push for really quick turnarounds. Your customer needs it tomorrow, yet you or they never responded to sign off on the order sample, then get upset when the order cannot be ready by the end of the day. Or, “Why can’t you do it now?” or you show up before the promised deadline and get frustrated if the order is not ready.

Educating your customer is one way to manage their delivery time expectations. Your customers have no idea of just how many steps are involved in creating an embroidered product – this is not their industry! We discovered that making an analogy to cooking made it easier for customers to get a better appreciation of all the steps in the process. When pressed as to why we cannot get it done while they wait, a response along the lines of, “Well, it is sort of like cooking a nice meal. First we have to figure out exactly what you want, like you would find a recipe. Next we get the elements, just like you would need to go to the grocery store. Then we have to create your design, which is like prepping all the ingredients. And finally, we bring everything together to create the finished products for you. It takes a bit of time. And we have several orders already in line before we get to this one.”

3) Cheap

Finally, we have all had a customers who says, “I can get it for less from the guy down the street…” That is definitely a fun conversation, isn’t it? At this point, you do have options. You can politely indicate that perhaps that is where they should be doing business. Surprisingly enough, their next comment often is something along the lines of, “Oh well, they can’t get it done in time…” When that happens, that guy’s price no longer has any bearing on the conversation. If your embroiderer can meet the timetable, you have the inside track on this order, and meeting or beating that price is unnecessary as well as unwise. If it is a quick turnaround, it may even be appropriate to tack on a rush fee on top of your normal rates, as incentive to get the customer to pay more attention to the timing of future orders.

For some reason, as an industry, we let our customers interact with us in ways that in many other business settings would be inappropriate, even downright ridiculous. Would you go into a restaurant and bring a hunk of raw steak and ask the chef to prepare it? Yet how often do our customers walk in with their own goods, expecting us to embroider them? As a promotional products distributor, you can buy apparel wholesale to bring to your contract embroiderer. It is new, clean and in a box.

Or customers give you lousy, unusable art and expect top quality embroidered goods. If they had taken that art to a paper print provider, they would be charged art fees/design fees/graphics fees to finish the design and turn it into something useful. Yet you balk at paying for art fees and even digitizing fees. It is appropriate and reasonable for the embroidery professional to be paid for the prep work that goes into generating art that can then be digitized.

If there are things that your customers do, or that your embroidery contractor does, that bothers you, step back and look at the bigger picture. What, specifically, is it about that interaction that bothers you? What can you adjust about how you interact with that customer, or decoration and anyone else involved in the situation, to reduce the frustration? How can you help those customers and those orders become more streamlined with how your business functions? Any steps you can take to move them closer to an ideal process will improve your entire experience with your customers and with your contractors, and that will be better for everyone!

Jennifer Cox is president of the National Network of Embroidery Professionals. NNEP members receive personalized marketing consulting designed specifically for their business. To join NNEP today, visit NNEP.net, email Jennifer at hooper@nnep.net, or call 800-866-7396.

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