Embroidery Mill, a UK based digitizing company is celebrating their 40th anniversary this year and we recently had the chance to chat with their director Dominic Bunce! Every one of the 12 staff members have been with the company for a minimum of 5 years and each one aims to provide an outstanding commitment to both design quality and customer services. We’ve spoken to Dominic who gave us a little insight into Embroidery Mill.
When creating your designs how do ensure the highest quality?
All of our experienced digitisers have been with us for a minimum of 5 years with our latest apprentice taking on a 6 month training course before working on live orders. We provide monthly training sessions to ensure members are up to date on the latest techniques and improvements to design quality and efficiency in production.
We operate a quality checking system where no design leaves us without first passing through another experienced design team member – we also like to share our work load. A customer would never know, but a design could be completed by 2 or more designers to ensure the optimum finish – having exceptional designers in shading and small text.
What makes your designs unique from other designs in the digitizing market?
Listening to our customers likes/dislikes and building up a portfolio for future designs to ensure they are happy with them first time round. With all designers put through a production factory prior to working on the digitizing side, it ensures that all designers know the complexity of production, and do not just design by a paint-by-numbers approach.
Where does your inspiration and motivation come from? Are there any artists, designers or digitizers that you admire?
We live for a challenge. Whilst general workwear designs contribute for the majority of our works, we love a challenge! Working with several fashion universities, we relish the opportunity to produce something that little bit different, taking inspiration from current market trends and retro designs.
You have a commitment to investing in new technology, how has this investment changed over the past two decades?
We try to keep abreast with the latest digitizing packages and are finding that with the help of Wilcom we are able to upgrade with ease. The new dongle system for upgrades makes it a great deal simpler. We have invested in new sampling equipment as well as laser cutting machinery to assist our customers in appliqué cut fabrics.
We plan on featuring a number of your designs on our website, how long (on average) would it take to create one of these designs – from start to finish?
Typically, we tell our customers 24 hours for a design.
Do you sell design formats for all brands of machines home and commercial? And where do you usually get your artwork?
We supply the .EMB and at present the digital downloads include the .EMB and .DST files although this is going through a complete overhaul to include a variety of formats, including industrial and home machines.
How many designs do you have in your inventory and how many of these designs are in the Wilcom .EMB format?
By August we anticipate to have produced just over 1 million designs with most in the .EMB format.
How long have you used Wilcom embroidery software and do you use any other software to digitize your designs?
We design solely in Wilcom and have used it since V8, prior to that, we used compucon.
We love these designs...
To download any of the designs in this post (for free!), see below…
