Embroidery Story – Signature Clothing

We started in a spare bedroom in 1989, with a single Toyota 820 and Wilcom ES 21, running on DOS on a lightning fast 386 PC with 256kb RAM. Funny now I think about it.

We started after going to a trade show when my wife was getting too many requests to do work on her domestic Janome sewing machine with an embroidery function.

We’ve since added another Toyota 830, a Melco 10 needle 4 head (one of only 2 in Australia), a Tajima 6 head and a Tajima single. The original Toyota is still going 30 years later.

We set up a corporate & business wear shop in 2001 and now run the largest corporate showroom in Australia. We added an industrial workwear shop in 2009 and sell in-store and next month online as well.

Our biggest mistake was not getting good advice about business structure & financing options, so we mortgaged our home to purchase machinery. I would never do anything other than leasing machines if I had the time over again.

We recently leased a Roland wide format printer/cutter to add digital print & heat press to our branding options.

I’m running 2 Wilcom systems, one in design, one in production, loving the extra speed of the 64bit e4.2.