BUSINESS TIPS
What you need to know when starting an embroidery business
POSTED ON DECEMBER 19th,2023 BY BAi
BUSINESS TIPS
What you need to know when starting an embroidery business
POSTED ON DECEMBER 19th,2023 BY BAi
Today, the embroidery business is becoming popular, more and more entrepreneurs are starting to use embroidery as a means of making a living. However, many embroidery novices only know that embroidery business is very profitable, but they know very little about how to start and grow an embroidery business. Today, we will share in detail some of the knowledge that novices must know when starting an embroidery business.
If you want to run a successful embroidery business, you need to determine who will be your customers first. This will affect what type of embroidery you want to produce, what channels you use to show yourself to customers, and how big your profit margin is.
You can do some offline research first, or you can search for relevant information online. For example, join some embroidery business-related groups on Facebook, or follow the videos of some experts in the embroidery field on YouTube.
Once you determine who your customers will be, you have to continue to get to know them better. The more you know about them, the more likely you are to reach them and successfully win their order.
When you know your target customers well, you will find out what channels they are accustomed to using to purchase embroidery products, and then you can conduct your marketing promotions on certain channels in a targeted manner. At the same time, you can also figure out what style of embroidery they like, so that you can make some improvements or changes to your embroidery designs. Or, you will know some of their specific requirements for embroidery quality, which will help you practice related skills in advance. All in all, understanding who your customers are and knowing everything about them will largely determine the success or failure of your business.
There are so many things that can be embroidered. But its hard to be proficient in embroidering all items, nor can you win all types of embroidery orders. When starting your embroidery business, you need to choose the type of embroidery you want to sell.
Here are few directions:
Hoodies and Sweatershirts
Souvenirs and Gifts
Customized towels or blankets
Corporate uniform
Children's clothing
Hats (caps, knitted hats, etc.)
There are really too many types of embroidery. This requires you to choose the most suitable type to start your embroidery business based on your own conditions. At the same time, you must also consider who you want to sell your embroidery to. After deciding on the type of your embroidery, you need to further subdivide it, such as: the design style of the embroidery, the quality of the embroidery, etc. This will also affect the direction of your business to a certain extent.
When we confirm the embroidery products to be sold and the customer group, how to sell the embroidery products or how to receive orders becomes the next thing to focus on. You can refer to them when choosing your own sales channels.
For embroidery shop owners with a limited budget who want to create their own shop at a lower cost, we recommend Etsy.
Etsy is an e-commerce sales platform that has become increasingly popular in recent years. It mainly features the sale and purchase of handicraft finished products. Etsy sellers are a group of craftsmen and talented designers and artists who pursue personalized creativity. They open stores on Etsy to sell homemade handicrafts. If you are looking for an e-commerce platform for custom embroidery business that is free to open a store and simple to operate, then Etsy must be your first choice.
In recent years, Etsy has become more and more popular among consumers. Its number of users has maintained a large size and is gradually growing, so you don’t have to worry about whether you can get enough orders on Etsy. All you have to do is to continue to discover the most popular embroidery products and make them.
If you want to learn more about Etsy, you can browse our other article: How to Create an Embroidery Shop on Etsy.
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that you can use to create your own independent website. One good thing about opening a store on Shopify: you can completely define your website, and yes, it’s entirely up to you what your website looks like. You can plan the content of your website and decide what to show your customers and how to show it. At the same time, you can decide what the domain name of this website is, and you can integrate your brand name into your website domain name.
But we don’t recommend embroidery novices to open a shop on Shopify. Although Shopify is a great platform, since you have to create your own domain name, your website will not have any traffic when it is first established. You need to pay some marketing fees on various traffic channels to let customers see you, which not only costs some money, but also consumes your precious time, so Shopify is not very friendly to novices. So who is suitable to open a store on Shopify? If you already have an embroidery brand of your own, then we will recommend that you open an embroidery store on Shopify.
The biggest advantage of online sales is that there are many customer groups, but it also means greater competition. You can choose based on your actual situation.
In addition to online sales, offline sales expansion is also very important. In fact, many embroidery shop owners will promote their embroidery products to family, friends, neighbors and the community when they first start their embroidery business. They started from the circle around them and slowly expanded outward, accumulating customer resources bit by bit, and creating their reputation bit by bit.
If your embroidery skills are good and you can always deliver your customers' embroidery orders on time and with high quality, your customers will be very satisfied with you. After that, they will not only be willing to place an order with you again, but will also be happy to recommend your embroidery shop to their friends. People are always more likely to trust information from friends or family than from someone they don’t know. Through this kind of word of mouth, you will easily create a good reputation of your own. After that, your orders will definitely come rolling in.
But the disadvantage of this sales channel is that it is difficult to directly develop business outside your circle of friends or local area. Moreover, when dealing with acquaintances, you may be embarrassed to charge higher fees, and your profit margin will be subject to some restrictions.
When you start an embroidery business, you will definitely face a problem, that is, how to promote your embroidery shop to customers, or how to let more customers know about you. If you want to get more customers and orders, if you want your embroidery shop to become a brand, you need to promote your business, this is essential! Just think about it, if people haven’t heard of your embroidery shop’s name, they won’t become your customers at all, right?
If you are more interested in selling products offline, then you can try to contact local exhibitions, enterprises, and school societies. Try to bring samples with you to visit companies in need. You can also hand over your business card so that others can contact you when needed.
If you are more interested in selling products offline, then you can try to contact local exhibitions, enterprises, and school societies. Try to bring samples with you to visit companies in need. You can also hand over your business card so that others can contact you when needed.
If you are selling your embroidery on an online platform, then how to get traffic to the platform itself is very important to you. What do you need to do to let more customers see your store and be impressed by you? For example: if the homepage of your store is attractive, or the product pictures are clear, whether the product titles are accurate, etc. These are all things you can continuously improve. Many people want to say that the platform has a lot of traffic and there is nothing wrong with the store decoration, but why do so few people pay attention to my store? That’s because relying solely on the platform’s natural traffic is not enough.
Most platforms have a function called advertising recommendation. Opening platform advertising can promote your store to more consumers and ensure that your store is sufficiently competitive on the platform. When more and more people are recommended to your store, and your pages and products are more interesting and meet their purchasing needs, customers will naturally be willing to place an order. But platform advertising is not free, and you cannot invest a lot of money in advertising continuously. So in addition to advertising recommendations, you also need to use some other promotion methods, such as social media promotion.
Social media is a very effective way of promotion. You can register some social media accounts, such as: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. You can share any content about your embroidery shop on these social media. For example: orders you completed, embroidery skills you learned, stories happened in your embroidery shop, etc. This shared content will deepen people's understanding of your embroidery shop and help attract people to place orders with you. By continuing to share content, your embroidery shop will reach more customers. Of course, if you just simply share some content, it will definitely not work. When publishing your content, you must do some SEO appropriately, such as using appropriate keywords in the title or embedding some hot topics in your description. When people search for related topics or keywords, your content will be more likely to be displayed in front of people.
In addition, you can also consider placing some ads on social media. In fact, no matter in Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, they all have their own intelligent advertising systems that can help you accurately display your embroidery shop in front of target customers. At the beginning, you can invest a little less money, and when the advertising effect is more significant in the later period, you can increase your advertising efforts.
Setting a reasonable price for embroidery products is a skill that every embroidery shop owner must possess, although this process can make many embroidery shop owners very distressed. If price it too low, then you won’t make any money, and you may even lose money. And if the price is too high, it will scare away customers, lose orders or affect sales.
Next, let’s share some common embroidery pricing methods.
For a detailed introduction to these pricing methods, you can browse our other article: How to price your embroidery orders?
Although these methods calculate prices in different ways, they generally follow the principle: total price = cost + profit. When pricing, as long as you carefully consider all your costs and profits, you will definitely be able to calculate a reasonable price for your embroidery.
Considering that embroidery machines are large and making noise when embroidering, it is especially important to choose a suitable workplace. Novice embroiderers face a question when they first start their business: Where should I open my shop? Should I rent a workshop or just set aside an area at home to work? In fact, the answer to this question depends entirely on you.
If you have a lot of funds on hand, or you are very concerned about the noise made by the machine when embroidering (you don’t want your family to be affected by the noise), then you can go to rent a studio. When renting, it’s important to note whether you can easily move the embroidery machine into your studio. You need to pay attention to the size and weight of the machine, as well as the height of the workroom and the size of the door.
If you don’t have a lot of cash on hand, it might be better to carve out a space in your home to work from. It’s best to have a spare bedroom, but if not, that’s okay. You can place your embroidery machine in an open space near a corner. As you start your embroidery business, you will use a lot of embroidery tools and items, so you can open an embroidery workbench next to the embroidery machine and place these embroidery tools and items in an orderly manner on it, because you will use them regularly they. Finally, let’s talk about safety issues. If you have children at home, you must be careful. The embroidery machine is a dangerous product and you must not let children get close to it.
The choice of embroidery machine greatly affects the success or failure of your embroidery business. Single-needle machine or multi-needle machine? Single head machine or multi-head machine? Which brand? New machine or used machine? These choices will all affect the development of your embroidery business. As you prepare to start an embroidery business, you must consider these issues.
In fact, both single-needle machines and multi-needle machines can be used for embroidery business. The difference is that the scope of embroidery business that single-needle machines can do is quite limited. Compared with multi-needle machines, the limitations of single-needle embroidery machines are mainly reflected in the following aspects: First, the efficiency is very low. Not only does the machine work slowly, but it also requires frequent thread changes, which wastes time. Second, it cannot embroider many items, such as Richardson hats, backpacks, etc. Third, a single-needle machine can only embroider some relatively simple designs, but cannot embroider relatively complex designs. You know, after all, a single-needle machine is just a home embroidery machine, and it is only suitable for use in the early stages of your business. When your embroidery business starts to grow, you will still have to switch to a multi-needle machine. After all, a multi-needle machine is a commercial embroidery machine.
Many entrepreneurs also understand this, but when they are preparing to start an embroidery business, they still decide to buy a single-needle embroidery machine first. This is mainly because the price of multi-needle machines is much more expensive. They can only settle for a single-needle machine.
Our advice: go ahead and buy a multi-needle machine instead of buying a single-needle machine and then transitioning to a multi-needle machine. If you have limited cash on hand, you may consider purchasing a Chinese brand multi-needle embroidery machine first. You know, the price of Chinese brand embroidery machines is much lower than some other brands. For example: If you plan to buy a single-needle embroidery machine like the Bernina 735, with the same budget, you can already buy a Chinese brand multi-needle embroidery machine.
When starting a business, should you choose a single-head embroidery machine or a multi-head machine? This question is actually not difficult to answer.
The advantages of a single-head machine are low investment cost, small space occupation, and easy movement, but its output is not as good as that of a multi-head machine. Although the investment of a multi-head machine is relatively high, its output is also high, and in fact the production cost of a multi-head machine is actually significantly lower than that of a single-head machine. Which one to choose actually depends on your actual needs. We recommend that you choose a single-head machine when you first start your embroidery business. When your business expands to a certain scale and your machine production capacity can no longer meet the order demand, you can upgrade your single-head machine to a multi-head machine.
After deciding which type of embroidery machine to buy, you should consider the brand of the embroidery machine. You may already have some knowledge about the embroidery machine brands on the market, or you may not know anything about those brands. Whatever the case, here are some factors you’ll want to consider when making your final decision on which brand to choose.
Price, this is an unavoidable topic, you need to carefully compare the prices of various brands. In addition to considering the cost-effectiveness of each brand, you also need to realistically consider your own financial affordability. After all, paying a high one-time machine cost is a great pressure for many entrepreneurs, and an installment loan of up to 36 or 48 months is not relaxing either. Finding an embroidery machine brand with reliable quality and high cost performance is the best choice for most entrepreneurs.
When you are confused about whether to buy brand A or brand B, the most effective and direct way is to read everyone's evaluation of this brand online. Every brand will have its own advantages and disadvantages. From customer reviews, you can understand all aspects of the brand. You can see what people praise it and what everyone complains about it. You need to rationally judge whether the advantages of this brand are really meaningful to you, and whether the disadvantages of this brand are acceptable to you.
After-sales service is very important for novices. In the process of using the machine, whether it is operation teaching or fault repair, it may make you exhausted. At this time, it is very meaningful to you whether the embroidery machine supplier can provide timely and effective after-sales support.
Just imagine, if the after-sales service of the embroidery machine supplier is very poor, they basically disappear after you receive the machine, or you have to wait for several days for someone to reply to you. This kind of poor service will make you very frustrated. You can go to social media to read people's service evaluations of various brands and listen to their feedback. Remember, you must choose a brand with excellent after-sales service, otherwise it will be really troublesome if you have problems later.
Many newbies often see a lot of second-hand machines for resale on social media. Second-hand machines are indeed much cheaper in price, but they are not very friendly to novices. In addition to possible quality hazards, after-sales service can also be a problem.
As you know, services such as warranty, operating instruction, and technical support are very important for novices. Once you choose a second-hand machine, it may be difficult for you to enjoy these services from the embroidery machine supplier. Therefore, we suggest that it would be more appropriate for novices to purchase a new machine directly.
You know, to complete an embroidery project, in addition to an embroidery machine, you also need some supplies. There are many types of supplies used in the embroidery process. You need to understand the characteristics of each supplies and choose the appropriate supplies according to your actual needs. In addition to local embroidery supermarkets, you can also buy the supplies you want on shopping websites such as Amazon.
If you are more concerned about the price of supplies, you can also go to some relatively niche embroidery websites to purchase, such as: richword.com, a one-stop embroidery shopping platform that has become increasingly popular recently. This website has auxiliary materials, machine accessories and tools, etc., which can fully meet all your needs in the embroidery process, and the price is much cheaper than on Amazon.
After solving the problems with the machine and supplies, we also need to find a beautiful embroidery pattern, which is an essential part of the embroidery project. We all know that good embroidery works can attract many customers, so what is good embroidery works? In addition to your embroidery skills and the quality of your garment, exquisite embroidery patterns are also the key to good embroidery. So where do we find these exquisite embroidery patterns?
You need to choose the way to obtain the embroidery pattern according to your actual situation. Here I would like to specifically mention the method of purchasing digitizing software to design embroidery patterns yourself. We do not recommend you do this when you just start your embroidery business. It will consume a lot of your energy, and the final design effect may not be very good. When your embroidery business gradually grows later, you can start trying to learn pattern digitizing techniques.
Having written so much, I believe everyone has a certain understanding of how novices can start an embroidery business. If you still have some doubts about how to run an embroidery business, contact us and we will try our best to help you. You can also apply to join our Facebook group to exchange experiences with our customers who are doing embroidery business. Bye-Bye!
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