ImagesMagUK_October_2020

IS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 30 images OCTOBER 2020 W hile most decorators were shut or scaling down during lockdown, Pete Tarrant was setting up a new venture. As a leading consultant and teacher in digital embroidery, he decided to go ahead with launching True Vegan Tees at the end of March, drawing on more than 30 years’ experience in the garment industry. “I’m under no delusions that it’s going to make me a millionaire, it was just an exercise I wanted to do, to see how to set up a shop,” he explains. The new venture – supplying personalised embroidered T-shirts online – is not Pete’s first experience of running an embroidery company. His first enterprise was, in fact, called The Embroidery Company, founded in Petersfield in Hampshire in 1989. It was a natural move for someone whose father – David Tarrant, a former Grenadier Guard – set up embroidery company Master Stitch in Portsmouth after working as a leather tailor and Master Tailor to the Queen. As a boy, Pete would help David out – he remembers stitching pencil cases – but his mum encouraged him to seek out a different career. Three years at catering college and a typically gruelling year-long apprenticeship at The Ritz in A passion for embroidery Pete Tarrant of Digitek talks to Mark Ludmon about his career in embroidery, commitment to ethical sourcing and the launch of his new garment collection – True Vegan Tees London confirmed for Pete that what he really wanted to do was get back to embroidery. “I‘ve had a passion for embroidery pretty much all my life.” Embroidery training His passion waned briefly after 10 years running The Embroidery Company and he sold up in 1999. “It just got too much,” he recalls. “I was working ‘24 hours a day, seven days a week’. It took over my life.” He took two years out, travelling to Australia and DJ- ing – something he ended up doing professionally in clubs and still dabbles with on his decks at home. On his return, he dived back into embroidery, setting up Digitek, offering support and expertise to embroidery machine manufacturers, decorators and other companies, from specialist embroidery projects to training and education. “By that stage, I had a very good knowledge of embroidery so it just took off from there. I have 30-odd years of experience and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else coming into what I’m doing.” For the past eight years, Pete has been championing the potential of embroidery and nurturing the next generation of designers at universities and colleges around England. After a successful start with students at Falmouth University in Cornwall, he has gone on to teach textile design and fashion students as a visiting lecturer at Birmingham City University, Arts University Bournemouth, London College of Fashion, University of Westminster and the Royal School of Needlework, alongside other training such as weekend embroidery classes at embroidery specialist Hawthorne & Heaney. At the time of our meeting in mid-September, he is still waiting to hear how teaching will happen under social distancing, but he is hopeful to be back soon. “It’s really interesting. A lot of them [his students] are very Pete Tarrant working with Wilcom software in his workshop