Greetings everybody,<\/p>\n
This month I am going to tackle one of the trickiest aspects of commercial embroidery and digitizing, programming and production for caps.\u00a0 Before we get started though let\u2019s define what I mean by caps.\u00a0 A cap is what I traditionally think of as a baseball cap. \u00a0Caps can take any number forms to include features such as, Six Panel Constructed, Six Panel Unconstructed,\u00a0 Low Profile, High Profile, Five Panel Golf Caps, Trucker Caps, Foam Front Caps, and a host of many others.\u00a0 However, we are not talking about<\/span> beanies, touques, visors, berets or other types of fashion headwear. \u00a0Each of those might be a blog on to itself.<\/p>\n \u00a0Quality Cap embroidery is always the marriage of four elements:Quality Digitizing for Caps<\/strong> \u2013 When a design is intended for use on a cap the design needs to be digitized for caps, period.\u00a0 There are some occasions where you can get away using a shirt logo for a cap but when it happens you are getting lucky.<\/p>\n Quality (well maintained) Equipment<\/strong> –\u00a0 As in any discipline there is good equipment and bad equipment.\u00a0 I am not going to get in to a debate on which machine is best for cap embroidery but I can tell you this, if you plan on doing a lot of cap embroidery it would be very unwise to skimp on the machine you purchase.\u00a0<\/p>\n Quality Product<\/strong> \u2013 Like machines, there are high quality hats and low quality hats.\u00a0 As important as the materials used to make the cap is the consistency of construction used when making the hats.\u00a0 If you purchase a low end cap you might find inconstancies in the construction of the cap make each hat in a batch a new embroidery experience.\u00a0 Using low quality caps can be an incredibly frustrating, costly and time consuming mistake.<\/p>\n Quality Embroidery Technique \u2013<\/strong> The techniques for quality cap embroidery are different than embroidery on flat materials.\u00a0 Aside from entirely different hooping requirements (which takes a great deal of skill to do well) there is almost always a big, fat seam running right down the middle of your embroidery, there are different product materials,\u00a0 different backings, different needles, different machine settings, different design size requirement.\u00a0 Basically everything is different between CAP and FLAT embroidery combined with the simple fact you are embroidering on something round instead of something flat.<\/p>\n \u00a0If any four of these elements is lacking your chances of creating quality embroidery on a cap is significantly eroded.<\/p>\n \u00a0One of the most frequent questions we receive at Qdigitizing is, \u201cDo you sample our hat design on a finished cap?\u201d\u00a0 The short answer to this question is, \u201cno,\u201d however, this requires an asterisk!\u00a0 *Unless we have the exact same hat, run it on the exact same machine and use the exact same hat frame, backing, thread, etcetera, we gain very little from sampling on a hat.\u00a0 We can actually \u00a0make it worse.\u00a0 *At Qdigitizing we use all of the techniques required to program for caps but we do not sample on a hat.\u00a0 The\u00a0reality of commercial embroidery is such that quality cap embroidery almost always requires dialing a design in to the specific requirements of a particular cap, a particular machine and a particular shop environment.\u00a0 This is true whether you use an out-source provider like Qdigitizing or even if you have the best in-house digitizer in the world. \u00a0And, If I can be so bold as to make a very sweeping statement, anyone who disagrees with what I just wrote simply does not know what they are talking about.\u00a0 I feel so strongly about this I would stake my reputation on it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because of this reality, at Qdigitizing we never charge for quality edits and we understand it might take more than one or two passes to get a design perfect.\u00a0 \u00a0For your part you need to understand when dealing with hats, unless the design is very basic it almost always takes at least one edit to get the design to be what you want.\u00a0 Digitizing is a complicated process with many factors.\u00a0 Caps exacerbate what is already tricky to the Nth degree.\u00a0 In next month\u2019s blog I am going to discuss how you can help us create better hat designs for you.<\/p>\n It is not only possible, it is easy to make a bad situation worse by making adjustments to a hat logo if you are basing an edit request on the results of a sample created on a different product.\u00a0\u00a0 This applies to you as much as me.\u00a0 If you keep a supply of CHEAP hats for running samples you might find a design will run well on your sample hat but when you go to the \u201creal\u201d hat, the design will perform very poorly (or vice versa).\u00a0 It is always advisable when producing hats to order a few extra to use as pre-production samples.\u00a0\u00a0 Over time you might find yourself with a supply of blank sample hats but I stake my reputation on telling you it will be well worth the investment.\u00a0 Color does not matter so if you tend to sell the same hat over and over again it is OK to stock sample hats of that style so you can take advantage of bulk order policies.<\/p>\n In reality this is true for flat apparel but exacerbated and if you follow the same guides for flats as hat you will always produce superior embroidery.\u00a0 However, it is not as critical as with hats.\u00a0 Finished cap embroidery is very tricky and getting good at it requires time and expertise.\u00a0<\/p>\n