I wanted to have my wife's old college name 'Stockton College' embroidered on an brand new, ole-school, heavy-weight, double-knit Champion sweatshirt like the old-raggy-one she was still wearing with the little C above the left cuff. Since Flexy didn't sell this brand of sweatshirt, I got one online. The first night I went to inquire about its cost, Rob told me $40 for the embroider work, but when I actually went back it was a different person with a different price of $30. yea! for me i guess. I actually took the time to measure each character font with vernier calipers from the original sweat shirt and draw it to scale in AutoCAD. I also saved it as a .pdf and jpeg. It was a simple collegiate lettering with the top letters in an arch and the bottom letters straight across. The machines computer at the store didn't like it. I guess it saw open ends and it didn't know how to interpret that. So I suggested that he just manually close the open-ended borders by manually re-drawing the open ends in their program. We got it to virtually fill in the letters as it should have. So I spent about $65 for material and labor.
After my wife wore it a few days, it started pulling.
I returned it and the younger (19yo) Lebanese kid was cutting all the loose ends flush...and tried handing it back to me like that.. They said it would have been better to digitize it which was another $30. This wasn't clearly explained when I took it in for the initial estimate, which woulda been nice. Long story short, they got me a much lighter weight sweatshirt and instead of getting it embroidered, I opted to have them screen print it. They didn't charge me for the second printed sweatshirt and didn't modify the first embroidered one, but I got them both back.
So from a business perspective, they totally did the right thing in trying to make it right. They offered to embroider the second sweatshirt, but I didn't want to risk the pulling happening on that shirt too.
If you have some intricate lettering (I didn't think it was that intricate tbh) I would pay the extra to get it digitized. I didn't fully understand how that machine worked and figured by closing the open ends of my drawing, it would be fine. It was fine, but didn't embroider it tight enough and so it pulled. Whereby, if digitized, it would have stitched it tighter and wouldn't have so easily pulled.
My wife is happy as a lark because she has two new ones now. A happy wife is a happy life, right?! haha read more