An embroidery shop near Seattle, like ours, or any other metropolitan city receives at least ten calls each week from vendors asking to do our digitizing work. A typical sales pitch offers “very low prices” and usually even a free first design to test the vendor out. It would be a tempting offer for many embroidery shops, who are often looking for ways to cut costs somehow. So why not jump at these offers?
The truth is that we used to use a couple of those vendors way back in our first year of operation. They’re usually based out of China or India. We are well aware that we are living in a global economy. It’s not these vendors’ locations that made us balk, but the time spent trying to go through multiple iterations of trying to refine a design while attempting to communicate language subtleties that do not translate easily across cultures.
We had to ask ourselves, “What kind of embroidery shop do we want to be for our clients?” We knew that the clients we wanted to win and retain were those who valued high quality workmanship and good customer service — clients who want to have an ongoing relationship with us as a vendor. Prospective clients who contact us wanting to know about price first are not oriented toward our values as a vendor. We want our clients to have leverage with us and to be able to ask us for favors occasionally, like rushing a small batch of shirts for the company softball team.
We realized that to be that reliable logo wear vendor for our clients, we needed to apply that philosophy to our own vendor selection as well. We now work with only one digitizer, a sole proprietor. Even though he is not local, he feels to us like he is practically a part of our shop team. Because we use only this one fellow, we have leverage that we can and have exercised to benefit our clients.
So to all you discount, free, cheap embroidery digitizers looking to win our business who happen upon this blog entry, you’re barking up the wrong tree because you’re not speaking the language we use when speaking to our clients.