Copyrights: What’s the real deal? Part II of II

So we’ve talked about customers coming in with designs not belonging to them but what about the issue of who owns the designs, the actual stitch files, which were digitized legally?


Large stock design companies have designs you can purchase online, such as Dakota Collectibles, to use to embroider goods. When you purchase a design from them, it’s understood (and written in their use agreement) that you’re purchasing the license to use the design, not the rights to the design itself. Therefore you may not give, share or sell these designs to anyone else.

With regard to the legality of a design you (embroiderer) are producing garments with, if you digitized the design, it belongs to you. You may decide to transfer the copyright to the company or person you digitized the design for. If the design is given without that protection, the recipient runs the risk that minds will be changed and their right to use it later will be challenged.

When the design is provided to you (embroiderer) by an outside digitizer, unless and until the rights to the design are transferred in writing to you (or anyone), they remain the property of the creator (digitizer). This is why you cannot give or sell the design later to someone else, since it does not belong to you. You are only being given the license to use the design to produce garments for your customer.

If you’ve been in the embroidery business for a while, you’ve probably unwittingly reproduced a copyrighted work. Since you can’t know every design out there but need to cover yourself and your business, a copyright indemnification clause, added to your company’s order forms, will in most cases establish your policy, protect you and set your customer straight. Check your state’s copyright and trademark statutes or a copyright lawyer to be certain your copyright clause covers you.

I’ve turned down many jobs of people wanting me to digitize Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Betty Boop or the Pink Panther. People actually get really pissed when I tell them no, especially when they’ve (illegally) incorporated them into their company logos…yes, it happens. You have to do the right thing. Protect yourself and your business.

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Information contained in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as professional legal advice. Companies mentioned in this article are used only as examples. Contact a copyright lawyer in your area for specific legal determinations and issues.

For more information about NeedleUp's digitizing services, please visit our website at www.needleup.com where you can view some of our most recent work and get pricing and more information on contacting us. Donna Lehmann is owner of NeedleUp Digitizing and she can be reached at 303-287-6633

Copyrights: What’s the real deal? – Part I of II

Every digitizer and embroiderer faces this from time to time. Let’s talk about copyright. Do we or don’t we digitize or produce a design we know doesn’t belong to the person asking for it? The correct answer is “no”.

Webster’s defines copyright as: the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, or distribute the matter and form of something (as a literary, musical, or artistic work).

Simply put, if your customer isn’t either the owner or a rep for the company or a promotional products rep slated to procure swag for them, the design they’re bringing you falls under copyright law and you shouldn’t be doing it. There are a few exceptions, but the bottom line is; if they don’t own the design, they have no right to use it and it is illegal for you to recreate it or produce it.

This comes up frequently with regard to sports teams, car and motorcycle manufacturers and cartoon characters, but is just as illegal with smaller logos of more unrecognizable designs. You can’t know every design out there but with access to the internet, you can sometimes search a logo graphically and find it. Know who you’re doing business with. Even if you unknowingly infringe and sew a design without authorization, you are every bit as liable as the person who asked you to reproduce it, should the copyright holder decide to make an issue of it legally.

In the industry, there’s a running joke about the “Disney Police”, but it’s no laughing matter. They exists in the form of whole divisions of corporations that do nothing other than to uphold the company’s copyrights and prosecute people, Disney and Harley Davidson being the ones that first come to mind.

As I said, there are some exceptions. Companies, franchisers and organizations like Girl/Boy Scout troops and car dealerships who sell particular makes have the right to use those logos however the company/organization stipulates that they must get their logoed items from them (the company) directly or through channels set up by them in order to insure the quality and integrity of their logos. The exception comes in if you get written permission from them to recreate/use the logo or get set up as a preferred vendor.

With professional sports teams, permission/licensing is applied and paid for and is very expensive and rigorous. The other thing you’ll run up against is car enthusiasts and collector clubs. Just because they are a Coca-Cola Collector Club or the Corvette Club (or own a corvette) doesn’t give them the right to use the logo.

Along with trademarked designs comes a thing called trade dress. Trade dress creates a visual impression which functions like a word trademark. Basically, a design doesn’t have to even have the name of the company on it to be covered by their copyright. That means, a picture of a Volkswagen Beetle is essentially the same as the Volkswagen logo for our purposes. This is why stock design companies have removed car designs from their offerings for the most part unless the car is so generic as not to be relatable to a specific make or model.

And one other thing, there’s a common misconception that if you change a logo or design by 10%, it is a new design and as such is no longer covered by the copyright. Not true. Don’t fall for it.

In Part II, we’ll discuss the copyrights of designs created legally.
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Information contained in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as professional legal advice. Companies mentioned in this article are used only as examples. Contact a copyright lawyer in your area for specific legal determinations and issues.

For more information about NeedleUp's digitizing services, please visit our website at www.needleup.com where you can view some of our most recent work and get pricing and more information on contacting us. Donna Lehmann is owner of NeedleUp Digitizing and she can be reached at 303-287-6633

Pathing and the Colorway to Success

Pathing is one of the most important elements to master in the process of digitizing. Quite simply, pathing means the order in which the design sews; what sews first and what sews second plus the progression of the design from first stitch to last. Efficient pathing is a design with the fewest trims possible and minimal color breaks. An optimal one color design would have only one trim which is at the end. This would mean that everything was planned or pathed so that all parts of the design were sewn without stopping. To do this, all stitches traveling between elements of the design are covered by the later parts of the stitching. The best way to start digitizing a logo, is to plan out the design in your head before you begin.

Along with pathing, color breaks go hand in hand. Generally, the design will need to be digitized from the background to the foreground so that elements of the design on top fall in front of parts that should be behind. The idea is to only visit each color of the design once if you can. (Some designs may require you to revisit colors later in the logo). A 3 color design that has 52 trims is a very poorly pathed design. Each trim is another possible thread break or pull out and slows the machine down. As an old boss of mine used to say, “We aren’t making money if the machine’s not running .”

The efficiency of an embroidery design is most apparent at the machine. If you are an embroiderer, it will be the first thing you notice and the first thing that will make you crazy if it’s not right. If the machine keeps stopping throughout an order making the job take longer, you may need to charge more for production. A poor design can make the job take 2 to 3 times longer.

If you’re a promotional products salesperson, the first thing that you’ll notice is how much hair your embroiderer is losing. This is where a quality digitizer breaks out front of the “cheap” pack. It’s great to pay only $25.00 for digitizing until your embroiderer has to charge you for editing and longer production times. Your embroiderer may even refuse to sew a design that’s really bad. If your embroiderer cringes every time you walk in the door, you may be using the wrong digitizer.

NeedleUp Digitizing is the “right digitizer”. We have the experience and knowledge to create consistently great designs that are beautiful and efficient at the machine making your run times minimal!

*****NeedleUp Digitizing is owned by Donna Lehmann. You can contact Donna by email: donna@needleup.com or call us at 303-287-6633 M-F. Visit our website for pictures of some of our recent work: www.needleup.com *****

The Design Part of Embroidery Designs

Often, I get company logos that very clearly weren’t originally intended for embroidery, to digitize. When a company designs their logo, they rarely think the design through for all the mediums it will be used with and focus completely on what the design looks like in print. This is detrimental later, once all their letterhead and signage is finished and they begin to think about doing shirts for employees and promotional give-aways. Then, they have an issue with consistency between all their different marketing efforts and their chosen logo.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when designing your company logo with regard to embroidery:

If you choose a design with too small or too much lettering, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to sew in thread. You may have to resort to screenprinting since the size of the text can be printed smaller rather than sewn. Of course, screenprinting doesn’t look nearly as nice ;)

Don’t use cool gradient color effects or multiple borders around anything unless you plan to make the embroidery very large. Gradients only work in larger areas of fill and with colors that will blend smoothly like several shades of the same color. For instance, there is no natural color blend from purple to green so this isn’t a good idea. Two and three (or more) borders/shadows around letters look great in print but cause embroidery problems; everything from too thin to sew and distorted letters to registration problems and most likely you’ll have to drop all but one. If the letters are minimum size, the border won’t work at all.

Remember, when designing your logo, simple is better. Choose cleaner text that is readable at a distance of about 3 feet. A normal sized embroidery logo for left chest is about 2.5” to 4” wide. Leave the phone numbers for your business card; no one is going to rush up with a notepad to scribble down the number from your shirts. Have the graphic artist set up your design on light and dark backgrounds so you can see what it looks like against different colors and be sure to tell him/her that your design will be used for embroidery also. If you stick to design elements that translate well to embroidery, you’ll be proud to wear your logo on all your garments.

NeedleUp has the experience to consult with you on the embroidery side and digitize your design, translating it to embroidery while keeping the integrity of your logo within your marketing vision. Visit our website: http://www.needleup.com  or call us at 303-287-6633 for impressive results!

Digitizing an Embroidery Design…..Sans Artwork

Customers come to me from time to time with a shirt from an old embroidery to digitize from. They either have lost the stitch file or can’t get the file from the previous embroiderer and their customer says they don’t have any art….so they’re giving us an old shirt. Now depending on the customer and the quality of the embroidery on the shirt, this could be a problem. Here’s why:

Remember, the customer doesn’t know how all this works. They just know they want more shirts and while they seem nonchalant about the design details at the beginning, rest assured they will closely scrutinize the design once you’ve done it. Save yourself some time, sweat and trouble by addressing the issues of the design before you begin.

The first thing I find out in this situation, is what they liked and disliked about the design on the garment….size, detail, colors, placement, everything. There’s no point in recreating the design exactly only to have them say they would like the font different or the shape of something changed. If they say they hated the whole thing (oh yes, it’s happened) press for artwork so you can start fresh.

You also should press for artwork if the shirt is distorted or warped in some way (like from multiple washings) and the design or lettering is crooked and puckered. It will take much more work to get everything straight without something straight to work from. Obviously, there had to be artwork somewhere, at some point, for the design to be done originally. Without artwork, the very fine details of the design are difficult to see and duplicate, especially from a poorly digitized design. 75% of the time, if you say you’re going to need artwork to move forward, they’ll magically be able to find it.

Conversely, I usually ask if the customer has had their logo digitized before. I’ve digitized designs from artwork only to have the customer tell me that it doesn’t look like the shirts they had previously done. Turns out the last design was either done from different artwork or was altered for the embroidery process in some way. Since I can’t recreate a design I haven’t seen, we have to start fresh, which wastes time and money.

Once you know what the customer really wants the final result to be, you can work accordingly, correcting your design to change the things they hated and recreating what they liked about it.

Customers still think what we do is somehow magical or that art gets fed into the computer and just squirts out a design on the other side. {Those are the $25 flat rate people :)} They don’t realize the technical knowledge it takes to program quality embroidery designs. It’s your job to guide them through the process and make sure they get what they want. Our job is to be in your corner and provide you with professional digitizing! Contact NeedleUp when you need stellar embroidery designs that enhance your efficiency.

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NeedleUp Digitizing LLC is owned and operated by Donna Lehmann, a 20yr veteran of the embroidery/digitizing industry. She can be reached at NeedleUp, donna@needleup.com or 303-287-6633 for digitizing, consultation and classes M-F.

The Cost of Creativity

It’s no big news that the embroidery industry is a very creative place, but realize from a business standpoint, it’s a highly technical place too.

If you’re a hobbyist, the creative side is most important to you and you probably have never gone too far down the road to figuring your business expenses and the cost of doing business.

If you’re a commercial embroiderer, you better have, because without this information you are flying blind and can easily go into the red. Red is bad. Black is good. Even just the basics will give you a picture in your head to help you make decisions that are best for your bottom line. After all, for you, you’re in it for the profit and the love of the embroidery.

First, list all your expenses for a year’s time. Everything from turning on the lights (if you have a shop) to yearly fees and subscriptions/memberships, supplies, office expenses, web cost (if you have a website) and any help (bookkeeping, accountant, web designer) everything…if you spend money on it, related to your business, count it.

Divide this total, breaking it into a monthly expense by dividing by 12 or a weekly expense dividing by 52 (weeks/year). This way you can see exactly how much work and money you need to bring in each week to break even. This is not profit, just cost to do business. If you want to know your daily “break even”, divide that weekly total by how many days you work per week. This can be scary and make you feel a bit pressured but it’s good to know.

Now, whatever this daily total is, you know that you have to exceed this to be “in the black”. You need to start pricing jobs by how long it will take you to do them, start to finish. How much do you need to make per hour? If an extra step is added, such as re-bagging the garments, the price needs to go up. To figure running time for a design: stitch count divided by machine running speed SPM (stitches per minute) = # of minutes to run. In this way, you can figure how many hours you will need to complete your order whether you have a multi head or a single head.

If you are a one person shop, it gets more difficult because you wear all the hats, i.e.: receptionist, production manager and machine operator. You can go a long way to being efficient if you schedule and organize your time. Don’t let the phone interrupt your production 50 times a day. If you have to, schedule call backs for a certain time each day and tell your customers exactly what you’re doing. If they understand that you will call them back and that you’re not letting other customers interrupt you while doing their orders, they will feel special and appreciate your attention to their jobs. Doing this will make you more efficient at the machine.

If you are a multi person shop, these figures can help you keep up with whether you can afford that new machine, an extra person to help or get another machine operator. Just so you know, a good machine operator averages around 35,000 stitches per hour.

This industry is a wonderful and creative way to make a living; you just have to be smart about your business costs and pricing. Cut expenses where you can to raise your profit margin and compete not only on pricing but quality and customer service.

Focus your time on the production and your customers and let NeedleUp take care of the digitizing for you! You’ll get professional designs that will run efficiently every time which will get you through your order faster and grow your profits exponentially.
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NeedleUp Digitizing LLC is owned and operated by Donna Lehmann, a 20yr veteran of the embroidery/digitizing industry. She can be reached at NeedleUp, 303-287-6633 for digitizing, consultation and classes M-F.

Machine Issues VS Design Problems

Embroidery problems are a pain in the…. BUT, learning to diagnose whether the problem is with the machine or the design will take you a long way past the frustration.

We’ve all been there; you just want to get the job finished and out the door and move on to the next one waiting, deadlines and all. That, of course, is when the gremlins visit and slow down the whole bit. Being able to discern where the problem is gets you quickly back into production.

Let’s start with registration problems. We can determine whether the problem is machine or design as long as we’ve taken care of a few pre-production things:

Hooping: On flats, always check that the design is hooped properly, meaning using the correct stabilizer and insuring that it is completely captured in the hoop all the way around and the fabric is taut but not stretched. Some cases may require an extra piece of backing and that can be tested quickly by adding it on the next run to see if it makes a difference.

On hats: registration is even a touchier point and some hat frames will fight you to be able to get the hat tight in the frame and it may take a few clips on the frame to help hold the hat. Always use your needle plate designed specially for hats to limit the amount of flagging under the needle.

Once you’ve assured these initial steps, the problem is either the design itself or the machine.

Design:  Digitizing issues will be fairly consistent. If the design doesn’t line up, say a border around a fill, by just a bit, it’s probably the design and it just needs to be adjusted. If it is way, WAY off, check your hooping. Designs are created with compensation for the fabric push and pull in mind. If the fabric is moving way more than the digitizer expected, the result will be poor. (This is why we ask what type of fabric the design will be used for) For hats, the design needs to be digitized specifically for hat application and should sew center out and bottom up. Without the proper pathing, a design may bubble or ripple against the center seam and cause puckering.

Machine:  Check the frame arms to be sure they’re tight and that the hoop arms are seated tightly in the frame. Cap frame bands should be tight across the hat with no movement possible once the frame is clasped shut. Assure that the pantograph is moving freely and not catching or bumping anything while sewing. Distortion such as a line of text that “smiles” or “frowns” means the hat is moving and pulling in when sewn.

Thread breakage is the other usual obvious problem. These are a bit easier to diagnose. If the thread breaks in the same spot of the design every time, it’s a digitizing problem. There may be stitches that are too close together. If it seems to happen virtually anywhere in the design, you have a machine problem, could be tension issues or needle burs (snapping or fraying). One exception is a “false thread break” where the machine will unthread after a trim. Even though this may happen in the same spot, it’s not the design. It could be the machine’s trimmers are acting up or the tension is way too tight.

Use your deductive reasoning. One thing to think about is if you’ve used this design before successfully, what has changed? If the design sewed well previous, is it a different fabric/application? Different brand of hat? Different weight or brand of thread? If it’s a new design, was it digitized for the fabric/application you are trying to sew? Are you hooping it properly? Checked needles?

Talk to the digitizer and get some input. If it’s a design issue, the best way is to show the digitizer exactly what the design is doing is by scanning the resulting embroidery and let the digitizer see exactly what needs to be edited and by how much. A good digitizer will recheck their design and adjust the stitch file to fix the issues. (There’s that customer service thing again!)

Once you get good at diagnosing problems, you’ll be able to get sewing again much faster with less hair loss!
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NeedleUp Digitizing LLC is owned and operated by Donna Lehmann, a 20yr veteran of the embroidery/digitizing industry. She can be reached at NeedleUp, 303-287-6633 for digitizing, consultation and classes M-F.

Editing your Embroidery Machine Designs Properly

With regard to digitizing, ever wonder how stitch files work? The original file holding the digital information for the design is actually a master coded file with all sorts of info about everything from how close the stitches are (density) to color breaks, stitch angles, trim commands, pull compensation and many other codes that tell the embroidery machine what to do. This file is a condensed (wire-frame) master file in a format native to the software and can only be read by someone else with the same software. This file is not the file that is read by the embroidery machine.

The stitch file that sews the design on the machine is saved from that master file and is in an expanded format the machine can read. It carries no coded information and is merely a list of stitch points telling the needle where to sew.

For this reason, changes to the design should be made to the original master so the integrity of the design stays intact. Once the changes are made, the stitch file version of the design is rewritten.

All this explanation is to tell you that each time you make changes to a stitch file without going back to the master, the design deteriorates a bit when the embroidery software tries to recreate the codes upon opening the design up in the software. Some coding is invariably lost, even if you open the stitch file up in the same software it was created in. Over time, this results in poor embroidery. It’s always better to return to the original master file format to make changes or go back to the person who created the master for changes.

This is not to say that editing expanded stitch files is not possible, however, there will most likely be more editing and recoding needed to get quality results. As always, turn to a trusted digitizer with the skills to help you properly.

Do you have customers that would like to change/edit their embroidery files and you don't have the original? We do that! When you’re looking for a digitizer, call NeedleUp. We have over 20 years in the commercial embroidery business! 303-287-6633 NeedleUp Digitizing ©2002 A USA company

Why graphics artists don’t necessarily make good embroidery digitizers

Numerous times, I’ve either read or hear about some graphic artist who decides to hang out their “digitizing shingle” since they know Corel Draw so well. To me, that’s like deciding to open a hair salon since they’ve used scissors before.

True, the creative side of digitizing benefits from someone who can be artistic but the digitizing process serves the technical side of embroidery and without the knowledge of how the machines work, production, pathing, fabrics, hooping and the mechanics of needles, thread, bobbin and tension, being able to create or manipulate a graphic is only a very small portion of prerequisite knowledge.

More painfully obvious are the graphics I usually get from customers who paid a large sum to their graphic artist to create a logo for their company, only to find out that it is all but unusable for the medium of embroidery. That’s because the graphic people don’t take the time to learn at least a cursory amount of information on the requirements of embroidery. They are selling a graphic after all and not concerned about their customers need or use of other mediums for marketing.

Digitizing is an art that is mastered over time and has a large learning curve. You can’t buy experience and there’s no “national school of digitizing”. In order to understand embroidery and punching designs, you’d have to have had some experience running an embroidery machine, dealing with production and some kind of guidance actually learning to digitize. If they’re expecting to use an “auto-digitizing” software (or digital to embroidery converter) that creates professional grade designs, there is no such animal. (And, truthfully, if they don’t understand digitizing, they wouldn’t know what buttons to push and settings to use in the “auto-digitizer” anyway).

Graphics people are great at what they do…. Graphics. NeedleUp Digitizing is great at what we do….embroidery digitizing! Leave the digitizing to the experienced. Call us: 303-287-6633

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NeedleUp Digitizing LLC is owned and operated by Donna Lehmann, a 20yr veteran of the digitizing world. She can be reached at the above number for digitizing, consultation and classes M-F.