Designing club patches

[Phrogger]

Having trouble finding a place to order patches that doesn't have a minimum production run of several times our tiny membership :/

Having worked in an embroidery shop, I can explain this phenomenon. Custom embroidery requires the logo to be digitized, sometimes in-house, sometimes out-of-house, and this cost runs somewhere around $25 per 1000 stitches (well, it did 10 years ago, at least). So you can end up paying easily $150-$200 for the digitizing, which is then spread over the per-unit cost. Embroidery machines usually come with several lettering styles along with a bundle of clip art, so that's why they can do crappy ones in the mall for so cheap. If you can minimize your thread count (are you using large areas of thread fill?), you can lower your cost. Using standard thread colors (no custom thread order) can also help. You might ask the embroiderer what they will charge if you have the digitizing done somewhere else, then shop for a digitizer on your own.

One last idea- Cafepress has a new embroidery process called Infinistitch which may be of interest. It's not traditional embroidery, I think they stitch the garment and then print on top. And I don't know if they do patches, but it might be worth checking out.

Love your t-shirt designs, by the way!

[Phrogger]

One more suggestion for the extremely budget-minded: Our club uses patches procured from the city of our city crest (the city workers wear these on their work uniforms). If your club is associated with a city or school, you might find ready-made patches and buy several of those. Of course it helps if your city already has a really cool logo! Screen printing of patches is also possible, and you can get this done in smaller quantities, although it doesn't have the impact that embroidery does.

[yeoldearmourer]

He can send the stuff to us and we do all of the are ownn digitized we don't farm them out.
www.yeoldearmourer.com