Embroidery

Embroidery is the durable, premium finish. A stitched logo holds its shape and its colour through years of daily wear and commercial laundering, where a print on the same garment would eventually crack or lift at the edges. That is why it is the method of choice for polos, sweatshirts, fleeces, softshells, knitwear, jackets and caps, and why almost every uniform programme we run is embroidered rather than printed.

It is also the finish that reads as established. A stitched logo on a softshell says a business has been around a while, which matters when your team is standing in front of a customer.

Embroidery machines do not read a logo file the way a printer does. Your artwork has to be converted into a stitch file that tells the machine the order, direction and density of every stitch, and that conversion is where the quality of the finished logo is decided. We digitise in-house rather than sending it out, so we can adjust stroke weights, stitch density and underlay for the specific fabric your logo is going onto.

Digitising is a one-off charge. Once your logo is on file it stays there, so every reorder afterwards skips that step and that cost.

The standard positions are left breast, right breast, back, nape of neck and either sleeve. On headwear it is the front panel or the side. Most business logos sit at around 80 to 90mm wide on a left breast, which is large enough to read across a room and small enough to look considered rather than shouted.

One thing worth telling us up front is what goes over what. If your team wears a hi vis vest or a bodywarmer over a polo, a left breast logo on the base layer disappears the moment the outer layer goes on, so the logo needs to go where it will actually be seen.

Most of the craft in embroidery is knowing what a fabric will do to a stitch before you run it. A few examples of what we adjust for:

• Fleece and towelling have a pile that will swallow stitching, so we lay a build underneath and a topping over the surface to keep the design sitting proud and the edges crisp.
• Ribbed beanies get a build underneath so the logo does not sink between the ribs and holds its shape as the hat stretches on and off.
• Fine poplin shirting is thin and tightly woven, so it needs a lightweight cutaway backing to stop the front of the shirt puckering permanently.
• Fine gauge knitwear stretches in every direction, so designs are kept open and stabilised rather than dense.
• Stretch service wear needs backing and thread matched to a panel that moves, so the logo travels with the fabric and settles back flat.
• Bags and structured items need specialist framing to reach panels a standard hoop cannot.

If a fabric is genuinely difficult, we will tell you what we are doing about it rather than quietly running it and hoping.

Individual names, job titles and squad numbers can be added under a logo for a small extra per garment. On a small team it costs very little and it is the detail customers and colleagues notice. Send the list with sizes at the enquiry stage, because each name is its own setup and a list that changes mid-production is the one thing that genuinely delays an order.

Embroidery is priced per logo position, plus a one-off digitising charge the first time we set your logo up. The per-garment cost falls as quantities rise, and there is no minimum order, so a team of three and a rollout of three thousand are both perfectly normal orders here.

If you already have a like-for-like quote, send it over. We price match and can usually beat it, because the decoration happens under our own roof with no middleman margin in it.