ImagesMagUK_March_2021

categories that fit the markets you most commonly serve. Start with trusted creators before you broaden your search over the internet. ■ Know your finished size Even if your software is capable of reprocessing expanded designs to maintain proper densities in fill and satin stitch blocks, stock designs are always best used at their created size. Many designs I’ve created contained detailed work or blending that used individually placed stitches to achieve the perfect look. Manual details like these are made to work at the explicit finished size of the design. Digitisers often make different choices about stitch type, placement, compensation and more when executing designs at a different size. Be aware of stated design sizes and help customers choose designs that fit their embroidery area. The idea that you should never rescale by more than 15% is a serviceable rule of thumb. However, the truth is that the maximum stitch length achievable before stitches become loopy and loose restricts how much you can upscale, and the shortest stitch and gap that will remain visible or stay open determines how much you can downscale, even if you don’t take things like the density of manually executed detail lines into account. H igh-quality stock designs can be a time- and money-saving tool, allowing you to work with customers you might otherwise have to refuse or who would be put off by the cost of custom design and digitising. Conversely, poorly made or ill- considered stock designs can hinder production and result in decoration that doesn’t meet your standards or the customer’s needs. Using stock well requires you to know when it’s appropriate to choose stock over custom digitising, where to find designs that serve your businesses and customers, and how to judge the quality and applicability of the designs. When to use stock designs? ■ Tight schedules When schedules are too tight for custom design – for example, a job requires same-day or overnight delivery and/or your customer has no design assets from which to create their decoration – choosing from stock can be much faster than generating raw concept sketches, refining, approving, and digitising before production. Shops that run one-off gift orders from storefronts and kiosks have long understood this model: for decorating garments on the fly, well- digitised stock is a must. ■ Flexible customers Stock is also a good choice when a customer has a concept but lacks complete artwork or is not attached to their reference images, or when the customer’s style or category of imagery is widely available in existing stock collections. For example, a client might want a design that uses a mechanical crane, but isn’t set on a specific year or model of crane – you can likely find a stock design using an appropriate piece of equipment. Or let’s say a customer wants a floral border, but not one composed of rare, hybrid flowers with unique colour patterns – you are likely to find something usable from stock. The bottom line: whenever customers are flexible, you are likely to find a solution in stock. ■ Tight budgets When a customer can’t afford to draw, rework or digitise their art, stock is your friend. Some customers may have poor or no reference material or want something complex that they can’t afford to have created to their specification. Some simply have no budget beyond apparel and decoration. Perhaps their order is sufficiently small that custom design work would double its cost, and they are not able to justify the expense. No matter why the customer is financially constrained, stock is sometimes the only way to deliver value in budget. Personalising a stock design with a similar look to a desired custom piece can be almost as satisfying as a dedicated design, especially when it solves a difficult budgetary shortfall. Again, this is largely dependent on a customer’s tolerance for compromise. What should you look for when choosing stock designs? Stock collections can vary both in artistic and technical execution. Some may even contain the work of hundreds of digitisers with a wide range of skill levels and talents; while this may add to the variety on offer, it also makes each purchase of stock a bit of a gamble. Large flaws in the art, or blatantly sloppy auto-digitising may be seen in the provided preview images on a site, but the deeper technical considerations are not often visible until you purchase and really analyse a design. To reduce the chances of a poor outcome you need to consider your sources and carefully choose designs that are well suited for your application. ■ Start with trusted suppliers At first, you may seek suppliers based on recommendations and reviews from industry groups and contacts. Look for collections maintained by a single digitiser or company as these are likely to be of the same quality. When you find a company whose offerings intrigue you, look for their free designs and test them. When you find quality designs that run well, look at the stock collections they came from and find the design This order was perfect for stock – the customer required a rainbow trout with custom type, but wasn’t necessarily concerned about the fish, provided it roughly matched the angle and pose of their original concept. For a same-day rush job, it was more achievable to digitise the custom text manually while editing the stock design rather than start the design from scratch using a photographic source [ Image courtesy Erich Campbell] Taking stock Stock embroidery designs can help even the most talented digitiser save time and money. Erich Campbell explains to make the most of these ready-to-embroider files KB BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT www.images-magazine.com 70 images MARCH 2021