The look, the feel, the quality—we both know that nothing beats a product with
custom embroidery when all these features are combined.
So join me for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how Printful maintains the quality for
each embroidered product worldwide, in this episode of Ask Printful.
Hi, I’m Elizabete from Printful. In this video, we’ll continue our tour at Printful’s fulfillment
center in Riga with our in-house expert Sergeys. We’ll start by going over some of the general
topics related to machine embroidery, which you’ll find useful whether you’re an experienced
or a rookie apparel store owner, and then we’ll show the entire process of how this hat was made.
So, we’ve talked about DTG printing on t-shirts,
but we also do embroidery. Can you explain how that works?
So, the embroidery process starts when you upload your image to our services, and then we digitize
it. After digitization, we have a stitch program that makes it possible for your design to be
embroidered on our machines. Then the process can start kind of easy. We
just take the blank product, put it in the machine, and start the embroidery process.
And can we use our own digitization files?
Printful digitizes designs on their own, because we're limited not only to the thread counts,
but also to the machines we're using. But it’s not bad for the customer. It’s good
for the customer because what we’re doing, we’re making a more precise
stitching program for the needs of our machinery and especially for our blanks that we’re using.
Is there a reason why embroidery is more expensive than printing?
In comparison to the regular printing where you’re just applying a layer of ink, and it’s
literally happening in seconds. In the embroidery process, you need to apply the stitches. So the
process takes much, much longer. It could take up to minutes.
And does embroidery also last longer?
Yeah, of course, it lasts longer. The threads that we’re using are already colored.
And also, you have this touchy feeling on top of it.
Kind of like a nice premium texture.
Exactly.
Right.
And one thing that we also need to mention is that the embroidery process is really environmentally
friendly because we’re not using any chemicals for that process. It’s just embroidery. That’s it.
We’re now walking up to our embroidery station,
and we’re going to take a look at the process of embroidering a hat.
So tell me a little bit more about the embroidery process—what’s happening right now?
So what we’re doing now, we’re picking up the blank of the hat, applying this backing material,
and then putting the hat on top of it. The fabric of the hat is still gentle, and when we embroider
it, it stretches. Because of that, we’re using this backing material to make it more stiff.
Now we’re putting the hat on the embroidery machine, applying the graphic that we want
to embroider, fixing the hat so it doesn’t move during the stitching, and starting a process.
Oh, wow, that’s fast.
But if you imagine how many stitches we need to make on this one design,
then it becomes really slow when the stitch count is high. This embroidery machine is the Tajima
machine, and it has 15 needles. We can see that every needle has a thread of different color.
During the digitization process, we’re actually teaching the embroidery machine which needle
to use or which color to use to make particular stitches.
So we’re limited to 15 colors right now. That’s kind of a lot.
That’s a lot actually. Yeah, most of the graphics you can do with that one.
When it comes to embroidery, what’s something that we have to do to control quality?
The quality itself in embroidery consists of two things. The first thing is what you see,
the front side of embroidery. You want it to be sharp, beautiful, without any stitches in
the wrong direction. But the second thing that we need to see is what’s happening on the backside.
Because for some products, especially for light materials, we also need to
add a backing material. So the blank that we’re stitching on doesn’t shrink. And also, of course,
excess of the threads that we’re cutting off. So that the backside looks really beautiful and flat.
So now we’re cutting off the excess of threads to make it flat.
What’s that?
That’s a heat gun. We still have some fibers, and now we’re taking off the backing.
Is that sandpaper?
We were discussing previously that you want to have this nice soft feeling. So that’s how
we’re making that. Some additional fix-ups from the front also, just to improve the
visual look of the embroidered product. And, that’s it, we’re ready to ship.
That looks great.
So my main question is, how’s print-on-demand more sustainable than conventional manufacturing?
This is kind of easy. Imagine if you want to have a pink t-shirt with a puppy on it.
What will be the regular way for you to get that t-shirt? You’ll go
to the regular stores, look over from one to the other
while you find this one, your beautiful pink t-shirt with a puppy on it.
But it means that in the background, there are thousands of shirts like that printed
so they can be stored and then delivered to the stores. In the case of print-on-demand,
you can draw your own puppy, upload the file through our website, and just print it
out. It will be your unique one, and there won’t be thousands of the same t-shirt stored somewhere.
Alright, I guess I’m getting a puppy t-shirt.
Imagine if you’re a store owner. You don’t need to have any stock at all. All you
need to have is your image that you’re uploading to our system for printing.
That wraps up this episode of Ask Printful. I hope that our journey behind the scenes
inspires you to create more outstanding product collections bound to become future bestsellers.
To help you with that, we’ve got free Printful Academy courses about creating
print-on-demand t-shirt designs. Not only you'll get to learn new things,
but you'll also earn points by completing each course, which you can exchange for bonus rewards.
By the way, our video team is in the process of making more episodes that will come out soon.
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and switch on all the notifications. And if you got some burning questions
about Printful, leave them for me in the comments.
Catch you later!