<via Tech Crunch>
Finally! A real embroidery solution! Yep… the rumormill turned out to be true! Check out the cool Stitch Player that is embedded into the TechCrunch page. I make a more robust post about Zazzle Embroidery later.
Here is a snippet of the article:
“In the past, most custom shirt designs from Zazzle and its competitors have used flat prints that are essentially glued on top of the fabric (these are higher quality than the iron-on products you’ll find in stores, but look similar). These look fine enough on T-shirts, but tend to look much cheaper (and tackier, depending on the item of clothing) than designs that are actually sewn into the fabric, and don’t hold up as well to multiple washings. Now, Zazzle’s new embroidery option is giving users the chance to have their designs sewn into their clothes, resulting in items that are much better looking and durable.
The process for producing an embroidered item is a bit more involved than for a standard Zazzle order. After selecting a suitable (non-copyrighted) logo or design, users upload their image to Zazzle and choose how large they’d like it to appear on their pieces of clothing. Zazzle then has to “digitize” this image – converting it into a format that is compatible with their automated sewing machines. To do this Zazzle uses a computerized system that does around 50-70% of the work, and then passes the files on to a large team of human workers who manually ensure that every design accurately reflects the image that was uploaded. Prices to have an image digitized vary depending on the number of stitches required (average prices seem to be around $10-$20), and the process takes 24-48 hours. But you only need to do this once for each image – once you’ve got your digitized file, you can apply the same stitching to any item of clothing on Zazzle without having to go through the process again.
The digitization process is simple for the user (you just upload the image), but Zazzle’s Bobby and Jeff Beaver say that the technology behind it is very complex – a team of Zazzle engineers has been working on it for over two years (surprisingly enough, this custom clothing company has a heavy focus on technology, with around 30-40 engineers). The difficulty associated with the embroidery technology ensures that it will be hard to replicate by competitors, and the team has also protected its IP where appropriate. Each image has to be converted to an instruction set of stitches, maintaining the complexity of the original design while still restricting the final output to fall within the physical limitations of the sewing machines.”
