Stock Designs: Beyond the Basics Embroidery Project

What are stock designs?

The generic term stock designs is used to describe embroidery designs that are intended to be customized for a specific purpose, yet friendly to a wide variety of fabrics and uses. The quality of stock designs varies widely, as does the style and subject matter. Whether you purchase stock designs individually as needed, or own one or more complete collections, they can be an asset for any embroider who uses them effectively.

Stock Designs as a Selling Tool

Some businesses don’t have a logo, but want to present an identity in their embroidered apparel. You can help keep projects in this category on time and on budget if you know how to use stock designs effectively. Here are some ideas to help you make stock designs appealing and fresh, no matter how many times you use them.

Customize with Digitized Lettering

Fig:1

You can help your customer make the design his own by adding digitized lettering to the design. The largest part of the stitch count is usually contained in the centerpiece, with the lettering comprising only one-quarter or less of the total stitch count. Custom lettering adds interest and individuality but doesn’t add a lot of cost as compared to digitizing an entire design (Fig. 1).

Would You Repeat That Please?

Motif type designs are particularly interesting when repeated. Instead of simply arcing lettering around a single motif, try repeating it along a line, and placing the lettering above or below the line.

Create a Logo Fig:2 With a bit of imagination, stock designs can be used to create logos. The trick to creating a logo using stock designs is achieving a truly custom look. You might insert a relevant design in between words. Or allow a design to serve as a stand-in for a letter. Think about the type of business and suggest designs that create an identity. Use simple illustrative graphic elements such as a compass or a key as the focal point. (Fig. 2) Ask questions about the customer’s business, and try to think of suitable icons to represent their business theme. Even the Virgin Islands Police Department selected a simple stock design with lettering with a simple chevron beneath for their 911 services division. The resulting design is a pleasing mix of bold graphics and complementary lettering.

Corporate Opportunities Fig:3 Think that large corporations are too large to do business with? Many corporations have small marketing teams, trade show groups, and even sports teams that are good opportunities for establishing a relationship. You can often add a stock design to their regular logo for a special event or outing.(Fig. 3) Be sure to ask for any special guidelines that govern such combinations. For example, you may have to keep other designs a minimum distance of ½" away from the company logo.

Consider All Options

Fig:4

I had an interesting situation just after opening my embroidery business. An aircraft insurance company was sponsoring a race in Las Vegas, where participants fly a particular type of vintage aircraft. Although I owned dozens of aircraft stock designs, none of them happened to be this exact model.

Eager to get the order, I did a keyword search with my customer present, using my searchable CD from Great Notions, using the word "airplane". Many airplanes appeared on my computer screen, including those from the Children’s section. As I rushed to scroll past the "babyish" designs, the customer pointed excitedly and said, "There! That’s really close." The design was a toy airplane on a spring, hardly suitable for a serious airplane race.

Yet, he persisted, so I offered to edit the design and remove the spring from the bottom of the plane. Then I placed his lettering around the design. The resulting humorous design was a hit with the pilots at the race, and I later incorporated the same design into a logo for a restaurant located near a local airport. (See Figure 4)

Mental Editing

Fig:5

Sometimes we are thrown off from considering a particular design because of its color, superfluous lettering, or other characteristics. When looking through your any stock design offering for a specific need, look for key elements within the designs. In other words, break them down into parts rather than looking at the designs as a whole. Basic editing software will help you get at least twice the usage from any stock design collection. (See Figure 5)

Make The Most of Your Investment

Fig:6

If you own a stock design collection, you will get the most use from it if you follow some basic practices that will maximize its visibility.

Stitch out a few designs each week. Seeing actual stitched samples of designs helps to sell embroidery. If you are in a retail environment, you may want to embroider designs on suitable garments or other soft goods for display. Use designs and garments that would be suited of people in your family who could use the items later. If the items faded or otherwise unsuitable for display, they can be donated to a charitable organization, such as a women’s shelter.

If you aren’t in a retail setting, stitched designs may be displayed inside sheet protectors in a ring binder. This helps your customers get a clearer idea of the richness of the designs they are viewing in the printed catalog. Stitch different sizes of similar designs, to help give your customer a frame of reference for the type of detail that may appear. For example, stitch a large eagle design and a small one, to demonstrate how detail may be handled differently according to scale. It may surprise you how much these stitch-outs help you to sell your embroidery services, even when the customer is choosing a different design theme.

Create Impulse Items

If you are in a retail setting, you can experiment with creating impulse items using stock designs. Special occasion merchandise and holiday merchandise are ideal for trying your hand at designing some pre-embroidered items. In fact, this may be an unexpected way to use some designs that you thought you would never use. The guest face towels shown in Figure 6 are quick and easy to do, and are they are real attention-grabbers. They are designed so that the one with the closed eyes is hung in the guest bath in the evening and one with the open eyes is hung after bedtime to greet the guest in the morning.

Display your catalog prominently

Your catalog should be displayed where it is easily accessible to your customers. Laminate the pages and place them in a display binder, designed especially for catalogs. You can have a copy shop do the lamination, or you can do it yourself, but the most economical way may be to purchase a laminated catalog from your design company. Practice envisioning multiple uses for one design. An exercise that is fun and productive is to try to think of several different ways to use the same simple design. For example, how many uses can you think of for the footprint shown here?

Can you think of others? Probably so, because once you turn it on, the process just keeps going. Keep the process going all year long and you may find yourself thinking of your stock design collection as an asset as valued as your machine.