The next time you are standing in line at your local coffee shop in Seattle, Scottsdale, Portland, or wherever you happen to live, sneak a glance at the embroidery of any of the folks standing with you. One of the ways you can tell how much that company’s embroidery vendor cared about how its clients’ staff looks is by how they dealt with jump stitches in the text. How do you spot jump stitches? Take a look at the image below.
Notice any differences? Your embroiderer certainly should!
The little stitch between the letters serves an operational function for the embroiderer but does nothing for the viewer. The operational function is two-fold. First, it saves time by allowing the machine to stitch the word continuously without stopping for 2 seconds between each letter. Over the course of many embroidered shirts, that time does add up. Thread breaks are also a little more common after a restart than they are midstream, and the time spent rethreading a machine is down time.
Second, loose “looping” stitches are a little bit more common at the start and end of a line of stitching, so it’s in both vendor’s and client’s interests to minimize those.
However, there is obviously a trade-off to be considered when contemplating the quality of the logo embroidery. If the jump stitches move the viewer’s mindset from “Oooooh…quality” to “Ewwwwwww…cheapo,” then the logo wear you just purchased for your staff is now detracting from your marketing efforts to build confidence among your clients and prospects. Not good!
So how is this resolved? Our goal is for jump stitches to go unnoticed. The easiest solutions are to either bold the text or shrink the distance between the letters. Both of those result in the jump stitches becoming less noticeable. Yet one more option may be to change the font. A fourth option is to eliminate all jump stitches.
Whichever path is chosen, the client clearly has the vested interest in the outcome and should be demanding an opportunity to examine a stitchout of the desired text and/or logo before the logo is embroidered on shirts, hats, jackets, or whatever else the client is purchasing.