Category: Blogs

The Wearable Network: Social Fabrics

CNN recently released an article on a startling new apparel technology – a wearable social network. In a nutshell, a group of students from the MIT’s Tangible Media Group and the Fluid Interface Group wanted to expand social networking technology beyond the computer or smart phone screen into the real world. This is right down our alley.

Wearable electronic devices, once mostly a sci-fi fantasy, have gone increasingly mainstream–Google Glass™ being one of the most well-known examples. This new T-shirt trend continues the wearable tech trend, bringing even more direct connections into everyday life.

So what does the T-shirt, known as Social Textiles, do? A thin circuit membrane underneath a thermo-chromatic ink pattern of letters in the T-shirt connects via Bluetooth to your smart phone. When someone who shares one of your interests (and is wearing a Social Fabrics shirt) is within 12 feet, the T-shirt “taps” (buzzes) your shoulder to alert you.

It goes even further: if a capacitive sensors in the shirt’s shoulder detects a handshake or a high-five, a one-word summary of your shared interest shows up: for example, if you and the other Social Fabrics user both attend MIT, and your shirt supports it, the word “MIT” is highlighted on the shirt.

So who would use this new technology? It could be a novel way to break the ice for two people who just bumped into each other, or it could be a way for a club, niche group, or fans to find each other in a public place. “It’s only limited only by the imagination of the designer”, says one of the inventors, Viirj Kan. Still in prototype, the social networking shirt might very well be a new wave in wearable devices. Learn more at MIT’s Fluid Interface’s website.

Some More “Normal” Current Trends

As “cool” (or scary, depending on your view) as a social network T-shirt might be, other, more conventional trends are going on now. The following list some major trends in the industry today, as tracked by the Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI), which we confirm from our daily contact with the industry’s key businesses:

Popular Decorating Techniques

• Laser etching
• Embroidery (look to specialty work)
• Appliqué
• Laser Etching With Applique
• Screen printing/ digital printing
• Multimedia
• More tonal, color-on-color embroidery; embroidery placement still predominately on the left chest and on the right sleeve cuff

Decorated Apparel Industry Growing

According to Stitches Magazine, the decorated apparel industry is looking up and growing. Revenues, profits, order sizes, number of orders, and marketing/social media are growing:

Rating the “health of the decorated-apparel market on a scale of one to five (one is “ailing” and five is “robust”), decorators gave the market an average score of 3.53, the highest rating in the last six years. Half of respondents gave the industry a health rating of four or five, up from 43% last year. Even better, nearly two-thirds of decorators increased their sales volume in 2013 compared to 2012, the highest number in five years…a 10-point increase over 2012 (53%), and a 26-point increase over 2009 (37%).”

Our ShopWorks Onsite order management software for promotional products will support this growth. Learn more about Onsite and demo it today.

Hot Markets

• Education/schools (athletic teams, bands, etc.)
• Government agencies/ alternative energy-related companies
• Uniforms (promotional apparel appears to be coming back, but businesses that require employees to wear uniforms are a safe bet, such as service industries, hospitality, local YMCAs, etc.)
• Health care (health-care staff will buy uniforms, lab coats, scrubs, etc. This includes the standard fare: dentists, chiropractors, doctors, hospitals, labs, walk-in clinics and pharmaceutical companies.)

Sell Green

• Understand the eco-apparel life cycle (such as: Where is the organic cotton grown? Is it certified? Is the fabric processed in an eco-friendly way? How about the garment dyeing and finishing? How about how it’s shipped?). Clients will want to know that you know these answers.
• Understand eco-friendly/natural fabrics: such as: organic cotton, bamboo, Tencel, Cocona, recycled polyester, etc.; an important part of the story is many sustainable apparel products and fibers are performance enhanced (moisture wicking and antimicrobial).
• Green Trends: Examples: Hemp and other natural fabrics (especially in home décor market: cotton thread, and natural materials; cotton, wool, silk, cashmere, mohair, linen fabrics and blends)

Final Advice

Decorators should:

• be familiar with top supplier catalogs
• offer clients samples
• bring clients new product ideas that differentiate you from your competition
• shop the market – attend trade shows, open houses and regional table-top shows

It’s a tough job to keep up with these trends and handle rapid growth. Shopwork’s Onsite enterprise software for the promotional products industry will help shoulder the load and allow you to focus on what you do best: customizing products and serving customers. Find out more.

The quality of your screen prints does not rely on the quality of ink or screen printing equipment, alone. The film quality is one of the most important factors to achieving good quality prints, especially when making hundreds of prints a day. Good film quality means your prints will be clear and crisp on the clothing you print.

The factors that make film quality good include clear film and fully opaque black positive areas. If the film you are using is not clear, it creates a filtering effect that can cause under-exposure and graininess in your images. In addition, if the black area is not opaque, you can lose details of the picture.

Three of the film options you can choose from include vellum, inkjet films, and Ortho Litho film. Of the three, vellum is the lowest quality film. It is not clear, and it acts as a filter, while the black is not fully opaque. However, this film does work well if you need to do one to two color jobs that are not very detailed. Inkjet films are readily available and produce decent quality prints, but only under the right printing settings. This type of film can be found in very clear varieties, and its opaques are quite black. The highest quality film you can purchase is Ortho Litho. This type of film works great when used for detailed and intricate prints.

In certain situations, using low quality film is okay, but a majority of jobs you do will require higher quality film. It’s entirely possible that most of your printing only requires a mid-level film, such as inkjet. However, if you sometimes need to print high quality images, you should invest in an Ortho Litho machine and film to ensure your customers are happy with their orders.

For more information about screen printing and other services, contact us at ShopWorks.

OnSite 7 ERP Software Suite

OnSite, our flagship accounting software product, was designed on the FileMaker platform to run on Macs or PCs in order to help you run your whole business. By managing many of your complex and time-consuming business processes, it frees up your time to focus on other tasks. It also makes your business run more smoothly.

Unlike other accounting software programs, OnSite allows clients to enter different sizes on single line items and define their own matrix. They have the option of turning it on or disabling it on each individual order. Since business people specially designed it, it is able to manage every part of your production, from art and designs to the economics of the process. It was also designed to operate not only in your office, but also on the production floor.

OnSite can eliminate as many as five software programs that you currently use to run your business. By consolidating your business, you make your life easier.

Choosing good business software is key to ensuring your business is efficient and profitable. With so many different onsite software packages and cloud software solutions, however, how are you supposed to pick?

Here are some key elements that you should look for in any business software you invest in:

• Support: While we often think of good business software as being self-contained, great software goes beyond that. You need the training to utilize it to its full potential, and often you run into a problem or need an application that you or your staff members don’t understand how to use. Good software comes with a support system and multiple help options, to enable you to use your software and run your business more efficiently.
• Training: Your software should come with accompanying information services and multiple training options to get you and your staff up and running. There should also be options that you can use down the line, if you need to retrain staff members, or you want further training in a certain area of the software.
• Ease: While good business software shouldn’t be so easy to use that anyone can hop on and understand every application, it also shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to decipher how to use it. Once you have the proper training, the system should be convenient, easy, and even pleasurable to integrate and use in your daily life. After all, you will be using it for a large portion of every work day, so you don’t want to get stuck with something you hate using.

Enterprise Resource Planning Software

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, and these systems, at their foundation, are supposed to help streamline your business and facilitate the smooth transfer of information and clearer communication between all levels of your business. With ERP, superfluous steps in your business process should be eliminated and there should be fewer miscommunications between different levels and individuals in your company since all information flows through one system.

For an ERP system to truly work like it is supposed to, it should have been specifically designed for your industry. This way it can anticipate common issues that arise in your company and deal with them quickly and effectively. The only thing worse than working without an ERP is working for an ERP that was designed for a different industry since this can actually create more work for you.

The ShopWorks system is an Apparel ERP system that was designed by and for businesses in the apparel and promotional products industries. With extra applications to meet your every need, we guarantee you won’t find a more convenient system than ours. Call us at 800-526-6702 with any questions you have about our enterprise resource planning software.

Upside!

Wearable tech–mobile electronic devices worn on a user’s body or attached to their clothes–is upon us. Or so analysts at Morgan Stanley believe (and companies like Apple, Google and Samsung hope). The Morgan Stanley group is convinced it will become a $1.6 trillion industry in the near future.

“Wearable devices will far surpass market expectations, and become the fastest ramping consumer technology device to date, in our view,” the group wrote. The analysts figure that wearable devices will have “far-reaching” impacts by creating a new class of products and disrupting or accelerating change within industries outside of technology, such as watches (with the Apple Watch), apparel (health/wellness devices, or the creative Social Fabrics social networking t-shirts), payments (if Apple Pay gets integrated with the Watch), and healthcare.

In the apparel sector, wearable fashion tech is taking off in some places. “Smart clothing” is the new buzzword, but it may come down to price–how many people are willing to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a shirt that glows when you run or a jacket with solar panels that charges your phone and tablet?

Downside?

Still, if the price comes down and the tech becomes more subtle, it may well be the next big thing–provided it can also prove itself as being useful (or else sufficiently “cool”). Will we see an “iHoodie” from Apple? The tech world is full of examples of both unexpected technology that took off and became a huge success or promising stuff that flopped. The iPhone took off when most people would have laughed at the idea, but then it arguably solved a problem–you could far more easily check email, browse the web, keep on top of social media, and do all sorts of other stuff with apps on the go. This replaced both laptop computers and far bulkier solutions.

Reality

So the question is: what are smart watches, fitness trackers, and smart apparel replacing? A Guardian article points out that anecdotal evidence and customer device abandonment statistics show that many of the new wearable devices just don’t seem to be taking off—many people tend to buy or else receive a wearable device free with something else, then forget about it. For example, 41% of people already run with their smartphones, so yet another device to track their steps (and that might be fooled by waving their arms) might be redundant if they’re already carrying your phone with a much more accurate movement tracking app. Any other potential problems waiting to be solved–usefulness, battery life, appearance, a killer app–just doesn’t seem to be there.

All in all, it remains to be seen whether the wearable tech trend becomes mainstream–and whether t-shirt shops might have a cut of the market.

In the Meantime

In the less tech world of decorated apparel, one of Shopwork’s clients won as a Top Shop, chosen from several criteria including “innovative business/decoration practices.” They use our promotional business management software. See Black Duck Embroidery and Screen Printing’s story here.

Embroidery Technology Then and Now

History of Machine Embroidery – The Early Days

The evolution of embroidery technology needed a seed to start. Machine embroidery began in the middle of the 19th century with the invention of the hand embroidery machine. The operator was required to move the fabric above and below the needle with a hand crank and guided the needles along a pattern. Despite the effort it took to work the machine, it was an efficient innovation, doing the labor of four hand embroiderers. Just after the turn of the century, in 1911, the first multi-head embroidery machine was invented, allowing users to produce multiple pieces of work at once.

It wasn’t until the 1950’s that embroidery machines became common and it was 30 more years before computer-controlled machines were invented. In the 1980s, the earliest versions of the modern computerized embroidery machine were developed.

Wilcom and Melco were two of the pioneers in the field. Wilcom introduced the first graphic design system for embroidery that could be run on a microcomputer, and Melco produced the first embroidery sample head and the first digitizing system for embroidery machines.

Since the 1990s, computerized machine embroidery has become widely popular for both commercial and personal use. Now, new technology is making the process even more efficient and profitable. Modern innovators are looking at new ways to increase the efficiency, ease of use, and versatility of computer-controlled embroidery machines. Some of the latest developments include higher speeds, more needles per head, more attachments per head, and more precise cutting with laser technology, to name a few.

Evolution of Embroidery Technology – Recent Hardware Innovations

Melco Industries, Inc. recently released the EMT16 Plus, which introduces a significant upgrade to their previous model. The new machine offers the advantage of embroidery heads that can be stopped or started independently. Traditional multi-head machines require all heads to shut down if one needs a bobbin changed, for example. The new model increases machine productivity by 50%. Another factor that contributes to the machine’s efficiency is the Acti-Feed thread control system, a monitoring system that adjusts the feed and tension automatically.

Another recent innovation was introduced by Coloreel. Their Embroline thread coloring attachment applies color instantly to threads during the embroidery process. This method opens up a world of possibilities in terms of color design and effects. In addition, it allows an embroidery machine to use a single reel of thread per embroidery head, eliminating the necessity of maintaining a large stock of threads and taking time to rethread the machine frequently. With a minimum of thread cuts and lock stitches, the quality of the embroidery increases with this new technology.

While technology has revolutionized the embroidery business, there has also been a renewed demand for hand-design techniques, such as beadwork and sequins. To answer this demand, Barudan has introduced a 4-in-1 machine that does sequin embroidery along with coiling, chain-stitching, and cording. The company has also released a sequin attachment for round embroidery heads that allows any needle on the rotary head to attach a sequin.

Another advance in embroidery technology decreases time spent on maintenance. Lubrication is a time-consuming task, but newer machines are replacing gears with sealed bearings and belts that don’t need to be oiled. In addition, many newer machines are quieter, more durable, and have more options for accessories and attachments.

Embroidery Shop Management Automation

More recently, the evolution of embroidery technology moved from hardware to software. Onsite business management software is a software package designed specifically for the embroidery industry. It has features that are especially geared toward embroiderers, such as design and production variables. With Onsite, embroiderers can manage all aspects of their shop with a single business software solution designed for their business. The proofing software also allows customers to approve a piece of artwork online. The software includes a price calculator that can base prices on stitch count or the number of colors. Another benefit is the size matrix that lets the owner enter multiple sizes for a single item. These features are of great benefit to businesses that sell embroidered products.

Streamlining Your Apparel Business

There are many parts of an apparel screen-printing business. There is marketing, ordering, designing, accounting, shipping, and delivery. Managing all of these different aspects of your t-shirt business just got easier, thanks to OnSite. OnSite is an apparel software designed to help you streamline the way you operate your business.

Now, you may be thinking that you have enough software programs helping you run your business. Why would you want more? Why would you want to take the time to learn how to use new software? The answer is in the convenience that OnSite offers. Instead of having multiple programs running at once, our suite of software puts everything in one neat, little package.

Right now, you have design software to help your design team create the images for t-shirts. You also have accounting software to manage your expenses and income. You have software running on your website that is specifically for ordering. Then, you have software dedicated to shipping out orders. You also have to find a place for keeping in touch with customers and updating them on the status of their orders.

With OnSite, you can do all of that with one suite of software. Instead of having all of these different programs working separately, you can have programs that work together. When an order is placed, the software takes care of it. When the design is created, the software monitors it. When customers need to be contacted, the software handles it. When the order is shipped, the software takes note of it. If you are tired of juggling so many programs, contact ShopWorks today. Let us bring streamlined convenience to your t-shirt business.

Google AdWords can be a powerful tool for marketing your screen printing, embroidery, or decorated apparel business. For a couple of cups of coffee a day, you could be driving quality traffic to your website, getting your phone to ring, and landing great leads. In the presentation, Google AdWords for screen printing & embroidery, ShopWorks provides step-by-step instructions and advanced tips on how to create a winning keyword campaign. In addition to helping you create screen printing ads, the presentation also covers how to do basic reporting to ensure you’re using the best keywords and ads that drive you more business.

The presentation, Google AdWords for Screen Printing & Embroidery, is hosted on SlideShare at https://www.slideshare.net/secret/DLmWZFX6SHH0a2.

ShopWorks software, OnSite, provides all-in-one business software from sales & marketing to inventory & order management to accounting & payables… plus much more.

OnSite 7 has been personalized to fulfill different functions for companies in a range of industries, including those operating at all levels of the apparel industry. Here are three reasons that make OnSite 7 a perfect apparel software solution.

1. The screen printing software includes design specifics that have been specially chosen for apparel items, including different colors and hues of ink, screen, thumbnail images, as many as fifteen custom parameters and squeegee properties.

2. The different apparel industry software applications allow managers to track production efficiency by either individual or department. This in turn allows businesses to maximize their productivity by focusing on the specific areas that need improvement.

3. The embroidery business software has a range of machine parameters, such as the time of set up for different jobs and the stitch rate based on either the number of stitches in a certain length of cloth or the set stitch rate.