RGR Embroidery.Embroidery 101

Page Key Points: (Overview) (Process) (Production) (Finishing)

Welcome to Embroidery 101.....this info invaluable to your success with us.

We have included this section to give our customers added knowledge in how the embroidery process works. Armed with this information, our customers will have a better understanding of what merchandise and what options are available to the client.
A second navigation bar has been added in order to jump to different sections quickly.

Overview:
Embroidery in today's market has basically become a powerful advertising tool. 90% of our orders involve clients who are putting their business or product logo on garments for the purpose of getting their name out in the marketplace. In this respect, embroidery has become a powerful, inexpensive way to promote a product or business.

Process:
It all starts with an idea!!! The embroidery process begins with an idea or a piece of artwork. That artwork then has to be "digitized" which is the specialized process of converting 2 dimensional artwork into stitches or thread. Contrary to popular opinion, you cannot take a particular format of art such as a jpeg, tif, eps, bmp, and convert it to an embroidery tape. Digitizing is much more than that. The digitizer has to actually recreate the artwork using stitches...in a sense...the digitizer is programming the sewing machine to sew a specific design, in a specific color, with a specific type of stitch. This is the process known as digitizing. Also, because embroidery is in a sense 3 dimensional, some exciting effects can be included to "spruce up" a normally flat piece of artwork.

Production:
Once the artwork has been digitized, it is then ready to be put into production. Production embroidery is a very hands on process. Before the process of sewing can begin, specific thread colors must be loaded by hand into the machines. A spool of thread for each color for each sewing head must be loaded. The machine itself is programmed by the operator to sew the design in a particular color sequence and a particular sewing speed. The garments must then be "hooped" individually, again by hand, and then loaded into the machine. Once the design has completed sewing, the garment is off loaded from the machine, un-hooped, and then sent to the next step in the production process.

Finishing:
After the garments have been sewn, they go through a finishing process. During this step, the garments are inspected for quality, individually trimmed of excess backing material and excess threads, then folded and packaged ready for shipping to the end user. Customers have the option of polybagging which takes place in this step. Polybagging involves individually folding each garment and placing in into a plastic bag preserving it from stains and dust.

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