Images magazine Digital Edition April 2018

www.images-magazine.com APRIL 2018 images 35 TIPS & TECHNIQUES branding, team style guides, or even the decoration of their location if the garments are used in a branded space, can be helpful in design. Though not crucial as the first list, these cues allow the salespeople to offer well-suited garments for the usage/ environment and facilitate tweaks in design digitising and execution, like alterations for durability, or the use of fire-resistant materials where needed. Whenever possible, on-site customers should match thread colours directly to live samples at this stage as well. The quoting and ordering stage has the responsibility to halt the order on an incomplete information ‘product’ despite being first in line; if the customer can’t or won’t provide the information needed for ordering and digitising, or the payment, deposit or payment terms haven’t been handled, the order should never be transmitted to the next department. The same is true of the quote approval – all approvals from the customer must be explicit and final. Never advance an ‘approval with changes’. Amend the quote, re-send, and secure final approval. Step 2: Art and digitising This department should expect (and demand) the following information from sales: Original art files, font names and samples Thread colours (if selected during the order process) Expected finished design size Garment specs (colour, material, type, construction and sizes) Expected delivery date [Above] Digital preview images of embroidery are never quite as accurate as we wish they could be. Take the extremely rough texture in the shading on this piece: on the actual stitchout, it doesn't appear whatsoever. This is why a real-thread approval is so important for highly technical pieces. The art and digitising department, on receipt of information, creates the requisite art and stitch files, producing clear, visual approval forms that show the customer all information necessary. It is a three-tiered approval: Quote approval – a visual mock-up showing either provided or created art pre-digitising both in place on garment mock-ups as well as in detail for the approval of source art. This catches gross errors in design, spelling, placement, etc. Digital design approval – a second mock-up showing the stitch file as a three-dimensional digital preview, mocked up both on-garment and in detail. This reveals disagreements about interpretation of the embroidery and gross errors in thread colour selection/placement. Final or photo approval – a photograph or scan of the embroidered sample. This catches execution and/or stitch quality issues. Always warn customers that colours in any digital preview or photograph are not 100% correct to thread colour and, again, never accept an ‘approval with changes’ to send information to production. Step 3: Purchasing and receiving This occurs concurrently with digitising, and therefore the sales department also has to deliver the following information at this stage: Garment manifests – all information about what must be ordered with per order breakdown. Expected order production and delivery dates Decoration required – per item for multi-decoration orders This department is responsible for accurate ordering and securing approvals whenever a substitution must be made, as well as recording substitutions for future reference. The receiving department must count in and verify the receipt of all pieces and stage orders for production, providing check-in lists for later departments or checking garments into your system. They will split vendor purchase orders into customer orders for production staging, ‘delivering’ to production only when each order is completely received. Step 4: Production and finishing This department requires information from almost every earlier stage, clearly explained. This should include: Production specs: design specs, thread colourways, placement and garment/design combinations Embroidery files and preview images in correct colours per colourway Garment manifests (per order) Packaging requirements (described in customer interview) Expected delivery dates [Above] Production departments shouldn’t have to guess at information; make sure they have a complete reckoning of thread colours and all preview images and sequences mapped out in your information system and in a hard copy. This piece is shown with the sample colours selected by the digitiser and the customer in concert. [Right] Always include the approved initial sample with any staged job for production to allow for matching and verification of a proper run.