Let’s talk about digitizing and embroidery on Caps.
Greetings everybody,
This month I am going to tackle one of the trickiest aspects of commercial embroidery and digitizing, programming and production for caps. Before we get started though let’s define what I mean by caps. A cap is what I traditionally think of as a baseball cap. Caps can take any number forms to include features such as, Six Panel Constructed, Six Panel Unconstructed, Low Profile, High Profile, Five Panel Golf Caps, Trucker Caps, Foam Front Caps, and a host of many others. However, we are not talking about beanies, touques, visors, berets or other types of fashion headwear. Each of those might be a blog on to itself.
Quality Cap embroidery is always the marriage of four elements:Quality Digitizing for Caps – When a design is intended for use on a cap the design needs to be digitized for caps, period. There are some occasions where you can get away using a shirt logo for a cap but when it happens you are getting lucky.
Quality (well maintained) Equipment – As in any discipline there is good equipment and bad equipment. I am not going to get in to a debate on which machine is best for cap embroidery but I can tell you this, if you plan on doing a lot of cap embroidery it would be very unwise to skimp on the machine you purchase.
Quality Product – Like machines, there are high quality hats and low quality hats. As important as the materials used to make the cap is the consistency of construction used when making the hats. If you purchase a low end cap you might find inconstancies in the construction of the cap make each hat in a batch a new embroidery experience. Using low quality caps can be an incredibly frustrating, costly and time consuming mistake.
Quality Embroidery Technique – The techniques for quality cap embroidery are different than embroidery on flat materials. Aside from entirely different hooping requirements (which takes a great deal of skill to do well) there is almost always a big, fat seam running right down the middle of your embroidery, there are different product materials, different backings, different needles, different machine settings, different design size requirement. Basically everything is different between CAP and FLAT embroidery combined with the simple fact you are embroidering on something round instead of something flat.
If any four of these elements is lacking your chances of creating quality embroidery on a cap is significantly eroded.
One of the most frequent questions we receive at Qdigitizing is, “Do you sample our hat design on a finished cap?” The short answer to this question is, “no,” however, this requires an asterisk! *Unless we have the exact same hat, run it on the exact same machine and use the exact same hat frame, backing, thread, etcetera, we gain very little from sampling on a hat. We can actually make it worse. *At Qdigitizing we use all of the techniques required to program for caps but we do not sample on a hat. The reality of commercial embroidery is such that quality cap embroidery almost always requires dialing a design in to the specific requirements of a particular cap, a particular machine and a particular shop environment. This is true whether you use an out-source provider like Qdigitizing or even if you have the best in-house digitizer in the world. And, If I can be so bold as to make a very sweeping statement, anyone who disagrees with what I just wrote simply does not know what they are talking about. I feel so strongly about this I would stake my reputation on it.
Because of this reality, at Qdigitizing we never charge for quality edits and we understand it might take more than one or two passes to get a design perfect. For your part you need to understand when dealing with hats, unless the design is very basic it almost always takes at least one edit to get the design to be what you want. Digitizing is a complicated process with many factors. Caps exacerbate what is already tricky to the Nth degree. In next month’s blog I am going to discuss how you can help us create better hat designs for you.
It is not only possible, it is easy to make a bad situation worse by making adjustments to a hat logo if you are basing an edit request on the results of a sample created on a different product. This applies to you as much as me. If you keep a supply of CHEAP hats for running samples you might find a design will run well on your sample hat but when you go to the “real” hat, the design will perform very poorly (or vice versa). It is always advisable when producing hats to order a few extra to use as pre-production samples. Over time you might find yourself with a supply of blank sample hats but I stake my reputation on telling you it will be well worth the investment. Color does not matter so if you tend to sell the same hat over and over again it is OK to stock sample hats of that style so you can take advantage of bulk order policies.
In reality this is true for flat apparel but exacerbated and if you follow the same guides for flats as hat you will always produce superior embroidery. However, it is not as critical as with hats. Finished cap embroidery is very tricky and getting good at it requires time and expertise.
I hope you have found this blog to be useful. Please let me know by reaching out to me here or feel free to drop me a line at steve.freeman@qdigitzing.com
Steve Freeman
Managing Partner
Qdigitizing.com
877-733-4390