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Improve Your Whole Life--How Choosing The Right Decorator Can Impact You And Your Customers
By: Greg Edwards
Issue: 2005jun
Choosing a decorator to either screen print or embroiderer your clients’ goods is one of the most important decisions a promotional products distributor will make because your relationship with the client is on the line. “Next week is the Super Bowl” or “The wrong goods were delivered to the screen printer” are not good enough reasons for orders to be delayed. He or she only wants to know that the order will be made as promised and delivered on time. This is easier said than done, especially if you have teamed up with the wrong decorator!
What follows will help you determine if you have the right decorator as well as give you the questions to ask while interviewing a potential new one.
Single- Versus Multi-Vendor Orders
Why should a distributor use an independent decorator (sometimes called a contract decorator)? Why not stick with industry suppliers that provide both the garments and decorating services? If your client wants a bag from Leed’s or Gemline and a jacket from Dunbrooke or Holloway, doesn’t it make sense to use these companies for the decoration? Absolutely.
There are two advantages to using a single vendor:
1. The company has experience with its products. For example, it knows best how to hoop products for embroidery or how the ink will lay on fabric for screen printing.
2. If the supplier wrecks one item, it can simply go to the shelf and pull off another one—and the order ships complete.
Why, then, would you ever use a contract embroiderer or screen printer? Typically, it’s about selection. The companies mentioned above have great selections and inventories, but our industry is full of many other suppliers that don’t offer decorating services, such as Alpha Shirt Company, Bodek and Rhodes, Broder Bros. and SanMar, to name a few. These suppliers typically have much greater inventory, selection and sizing options, and none of them offer any type of screen-printing or embroidery services. They can’t. Why?
First, 30- to 40-percent of their customers are decorators who would consider their offering decoration a threat that would dramatically decrease their revenue. Second, their volume is just too great. There is no way any of these larger suppliers could even begin to handle the volume of screen printing and embroidery that eventually is needed on the tractor-trailer loads of garments shipped in a single day. That’s what the thousands of decorators to whom all these garments are being shipped do!
So if you can find what your customer wants—and the supplier can get it decorated on time—stick with the single vendor. But don’t overlook the advantages of building a relationship with an outside decorator who may be faster and more flexible.
Advantages Of Using A Contract Decorator
Building a relationship with the right decorator can help your business and reduce stress in your life. I once met a woman at a tradeshow who said, “If I could only find the right embroiderer, my whole life would be improved!” That might be going a little far, but if you do have the right relationship with a competent embroiderer or screen printer, you have a big advantage over your competitors.
The most important advantage is speed. The big wholesalers have inventory and decorators have capacity, so 48-hour turnaround is the norm. If your customer is in a hurry and you have the right relationships, you’ll continue to get the business. Typically speaking, the one-stop vendors who supply the garments and do the decorating are not known for fast turnaround.
Another advantage of using a contractor is consistency: same machines, same design—just different garments. Every digitizer will approach each logo differently. So once your client is happy with the logo’s appearance, it is recommended to use the same digitized file for all of its orders. If you have multiple vendors using multiple designs, there is a greater risk of inconsistencies occurring on your customer’s logo.
The third advantage is that of reliability. Once you have a relationship established, a good contractor will be less likely to let you down because he or she knows you are a consistent and loyal customer. The contractor relies on you for continued volume, and you rely on him or her to make you look good in front of your customer.
Price can also be an advantage, as some decorators will offer a “program price” on a particular logo or design. Thus, you receive preferred pricing on that logo for all order quantities—say, as an example “24 units or higher get the 150-299 column price.”
Local Or Not
When we are exhibiting our contract embroidery services at a tradeshow, one of the first questions most distributors ask is, “Where are you located?” It’s actually a really good question—but not for the reason you may think.
It’s my opinion that if a decorator is in the same town where most of your customers are located, I wouldn’t use that company. Let me explain. Most industry veterans who have used local decorators will admit that every time they stop by their local screen-printing or embroidery shop, they walk in the back to see “what’s going on.” And each time, they see what’s running on the machines, including the logo, the size of the order and—if they have become friends with the backroom staff—the ship-to address! Getting customers is hard enough, and you certainly don’t want to have your local competitors walking around your orders and getting leads for new prospects!
Another reason for not using a local decorator is this forces you and the company to have a very well-communicated purchase order and approval process in place so you don’t have to “go over to your decorator” to approve or explain a job. You might think you are giving great customer service by personally checking on your customer’s order, but I’d argue you are wasting a ton of valuable selling time you could use to grow your business. If you have the right decorator, there is no need to ever step foot in its office. You never need to stop by the BIC factory to check on your pen order—right? As long as the decorator is within two days UPS Ground of your primary customer base, you should have no problems not using a “local decorator.”
The Five Most Important Questions To Ask Any Potential Decorator
After 10 years in the embroidery business and because I’ve seen all the problems that can go wrong with any given order, I have a pretty good feel for the questions I’d ask a potential decorator. If the decorator doesn’t have a system in place to overcome these common pitfalls, look out!
1. How do I know my garments have arrived safely? Are they inventoried the same day?
Occasionally, picking errors are made by the major blank wholesalers—the wrong style, color or quantity is shipped to your decorator. If you know about the mistake right away, the supplier will correct it quickly at no charge to you.
Many things can go wrong if this step is not done correctly. The decorator may not know it has the wrong goods or sizes and inadvertently decorates them. “You decorate it, you own it” is the policy at most major blank wholesalers. The next problem is timing. If the decorator waits until it is about to run your order and discovers the items are wrong, you will probably miss the ship date—and your customer will not be loving you.
Have the decorator explain its receiving process and have a sample report either faxed or e-mailed to you. It should include the color, type of fabric (what if you ordered piqué and brushed cotton was shipped instead?), style numbers and sizes in every box delivered.
2. What is the experience level of your artist/digitizer? Upon order completion, who owns the artwork/software file?
Both screen-printing and embroidery work is only as good as the artist who created the screen or the digitized file. It’s your job to find the good ones that “stand out” in your customers’ eyes. Asking lots of questions and seeing samples of past work are ways to approach this task—along with asking for referrals.
If you are going to spend $75 - $200 either setting up your customer’s artwork or having its logo digitized for embroidery, you need to know who is going to own that software. I’d be nervous if a decorator says, “I own it.” You paid for it, so why would you not own it? Perhaps the company is afraid you might take the work elsewhere. But if it doesn’t perform as expected, this is exactly what you should do. If your decorator doesn’t supply you with a no-questions-asked-free-copy of your artwork/digitized file, I’d look at starting a relationship with another company. What if a fire destroyed the company or a computer virus killed its server? All those files you and your customer purchased would be gone. You need your own copies.
3. What is your approval process? Once the job is approved, when will it ship?
You send in a purchase order, your goods arrive, your design is approved and your job is ready to run. Does the decorator send you an approval form to verify the details of the entire job before it ships? This document should include the agreed-upon price, the ship-to address, the must-ship date, the method of shipping (UPS Ground versus FedEx Overnight), the location of the logo and a picture of it along with the ink or thread colors. If your purchase order says left chest and it placed the logo on the right chest, the decorator owes you new shirts—but you missed your customer’s in-hands date!
An extra set of eyes to look over the order can save a disaster from occurring. Larger shops typically have a 48-hour turnaround after approval. Maybe you are not in a hurry, but be sure to ask the question, “If you promise Thursday and it doesn’t ship, what happens?” I’d expect free overnight shipping and a discount on the job!
4. What happens if garments were damaged in the decorating process? How do I know my complete order shipped?
If the decorator wrecks a few of your garments during the decoration process, who pays? It’s better to ask in advance than to find out later that only 97 out of 100 jackets made it to the customer, and all the decorator can say is, “Sorry.” As a guideline, larger embroiderers typically cover 100 percent of damages with some kind of cap, such as “maximum $18 per garment.”
Additionally, the last thing you want to do is hunt down your decorator and look for tracking numbers of boxes that never arrived at your customer’s hotel. Verify that your decorator has a process in place to send you tracking numbers and complete information about every shipment. It’s best if it is supplied via e-mail, then you can hopefully track each box with a simple click of a button.
5. Do you invoice the day my goods ship?
This might sound a little funny, but one of the worst things a decorator can do is hold up your receivable process by not getting you the final charges, thereby keeping you from invoicing your customer. If the decorator runs the shop like a business, the invoice should be an automatic part of the order process.
Passing The Test
There are plenty of decorators who will pass this test with flying colors. You just have to go out and find them. If your current sources fall short in many of these areas and won’t make the changes to improve both your businesses, perhaps it’s time to move on and find a decorator that will “improve your whole life!”
Greg Edwards is the owner and founder of Buffalo, New York-based Big Bear, Inc. (UPIC: BigBe411), a supplier of embroidery, fulfillment and online company stores. The company has 174 sewing heads and 50 employees, producing more than 4,000 decorated garments per day. Prior to entering the promotional products industry 10 years ago, he spent a decade in corporate America working with companies such as Pepsi Cola and American Hospital Supply.
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