| Part of being a successful shop owner is managing your costs. Therefore, it’s critical that you monitor where and how your money is being spent. However, that doesn’t mean you should cut corners. Instead, you need to spend your dollars wisely. Not making purchases for the sake of saving money is not necessarily smart money management. Here are some examples. | | Needles Do you save needles to reuse later? Do you try to see how long you can go without changing needles? Needles are cheap! Producing poor quality embroidery is not. Anytime you change from one style of needle to another, regardless of how long the previous needle was installed, throw the old one away. In addition, change out your existing needles on a routine basis. How often depends on how much sewing you are doing, but my preference is at least once per month.
Consider this. A package of 100 needles averages $20.00 which works out to $0.20 per needle. Is it really worth it to reuse or overuse needles? | | Bobbins Bobbins are another area where you can be a bit overzealous. Do you run bobbins to the very end in order to maximize your cost savings? Nothing wrong with saving money, but this is another example of a wasted effort that can lead to costing you some real dollars in the long run.
First of all, the quality of the last 5-10% of most bobbins is questionable. Many times, the thread coming off is kinked and brittle, leading to inconsistent tension and possibly bobbin thread breaks. Of course, every thread break slows down production and costs you money, but the inconsistent tension is a far greater concern since it can result in poor quality top stitching and/or bobbin thread showing on the top. When this happens, you may be forced to remove the stitches and re-sew that area of the design that was affected. And it’s quite possible you will have to remove the entire design and re-sew it from the beginning. Worse yet, you end up damaging the garment while trying to fix it, and then have to replace it. | | Bobbins are cheap - downtime and damaged garments are not. As a general rule, you can get about 30,000 stitches per bobbin (depends on tension and stitch lengths). Keep an eye on the bobbin and change it out at the beginning or end of a run, rather than in the middle. | | Thread Determined to stretch your thread purchasing dollars? Perhaps you have resorted to running a cone to the bitter end, standing guard at the machine and watching diligently until the last inch comes off the cone and makes its way up towards the thread tree, dangling and twisting in mid-air. You stop the machine, and gleefully replace the empty cone with a fresh one and then tie off the ends of the old thread to the new one. Then you carefully pull the knotted section through the upper thread path, down to the needle and through the eye. (Hopefully the knot doesn’t come apart along the way.)
Wow, how much money did you just save by running this cone of thread out to the bitter end? Let’s see, a yard of thread from a $7.00 cone is worth about $0.12. In order to achieve this miraculous cost-savings, you camped out in front of the machine for several minutes waiting until the moment of final separation between thread and cone, then stopped the job in the middle of sewing to replace the thread cone. But I’m sure it was worth every penny, excuse me, fraction of every penny saved. | Time is money in this business. Production needs to be continuous and uninterrupted. Plus, you need to make the most out of your own time, by keeping the production flowing, making sales, ordering products, managing inventory, etc. Wasting time trying to save a penny just doesn’t make sense.
In addition, the final few yards of a thread cone may be of questionable quality, (just like with a bobbin) leading to tension problems and thread breaks. Both of these can cost you considerably more money than you would have saved by running the thread out to the end of the cone.
| Backing Backing is another area that you can get carried away with. It makes perfect sense to save large scraps of backing, leftover from big jobs such as jacket-backs, to reuse on smaller jobs like left-chest logos. However, in your zealous quest for saving a buck, are you setting yourself up for failure?
One of the rules of hooping is that the backing must be larger than the hoop, so it is fully captured and supported by the hoop itself. The only way that backing provides stability to the garment is when it is properly secured to begin with. If not, then the degree of stabilization will be greatly reduced and possibly even eliminated. So any scraps that are too small to fit the required hoop should not be used.
| Now you might try to get really creative and piece together some small scraps so that as a combined unit, the size is greater than the area of the hoop. Another bad idea!
If you have overlapping pieces of backing, then you will have uneven hoop tension. Remember that the backing is sandwiched along with the garment between the inner and outer hoop rings. Where there are multiple layers of backing between the hoop rings, there is a greater thickness, which means the hoop tension is greatest in these areas only. In the sections between the rings, where there is only one layer of backing, the hoop tension will be less. What that means is that the degree of stabilization is not equal all the way around the hoop, so the fabric will have the ability to shift during sewing in those locations of lesser hoop tension. Bottom line, you are only saving a tiny amount of money by reusing backing, and doing so improperly can lead to poor quality sewing, which can cost you a lot more in the long run. | | At the end of the day, the real money is in how much you successfully produced without any quality issues, as downtime and questionable quality are huge drains on your profitability. There is nothing wrong with trying to stretch your business dollars, just do sew wisely! |
By: James M. (Jimmy) Lamb
Published: October 2007 | |
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