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Embroidery & Printing

Howsafe are experts in embroidery and direct-to-film and vinyl printing onto a range of workwear and corporate clothing. We've put together this embroidery and printing guide to help make the process of branding your uniforms a little bit easier. You can add your company logo, name or design to most items in our workwear range, 

Howsafe Embroided T-Shirt

Embroidery & Printing Guide

Putting together your first clothing order with your logo or name can often be fraught with difficulties, especially without expert advice.

Howsafe, industry specialists in logo application have put together this buyer’s guide so that you, the customer, can make informed decisions before you part with your hard-earned cash.

Obviously we hope you will give us the opportunity to quote for your requirements - If you would like a free quote with no obligation to buy please call Tel (01733) 560669 or drop us an email at [email protected]

Why choose Embroidery and Print?
  • Generate brand awareness and promote your organisation 
  • Make your organisation stand out from the crowd
  • Help your crew feel part of a team. Businesses often gift branded clothing to their employees to enhance productivity
  • Build trust by identifying your employees
  • Reassure customers that they are dealing with a professional company
Embroidery Machinery

Direct-to-film and Embroidery Systems

The quality of equipment used to create embroidered and printed logos can vary greatly. The use of poorly-maintained machines or equipment set at excessive speeds to achieve higher throughput can compromise quality of finish and produce poor results.

Howsafe uses on-site, state-of-the-art embroidery and printing machinery to provide a superb finish to all logos. All equipment is agent-serviced and configured to produce optimum quality, not to achieve higher turnover of orders. With multiple machines we are able to cope with fluctuating volumes.

Embroidery

Recently our embroidery department expanded following the delivery of an additional brand new embroidery machine. The SWF-6 is one of the most versatile and advanced embroidery machines on the market and can operate at blistering speeds at up to 1000rpm. The unit is now installed in our dedicated two-storey print and embroidery centre.

Direct-to-film Printing

We have also invested in the state-of-the-art Mimaki TxF300-75 direct-to-film printer, which is paired with an Adkins Inline 800 shaker unit, recommended by Mimaki as their in-line solution of choice. This combination ensures precision, efficiency, and consistency, allowing us to deliver top-quality workwear with every order..

Over the last 12 months we have further upgraded our in-house service by creating separate embroidery and printing facilities within our warehouses, each led by their own dedicated teams.  As of today we've never had such an efficient branding service, but of course we are always 100% focused on improvement and will continue to explore new technologies and approaches as they emerge.

Design Size

As with all artwork, the smaller and simpler the designs is, the easier it is to produce at a lower cost.

We find that In most cases, smaller discrete logos can often be more aesthetically pleasing than large designs. The trick of course is to strike a balance between impact and style that successfully projects the image that you are looking for. Polo shirts and sweat shirts look great with smaller pocket sized logos as where hi-viz garments possibly look better with large eye catching designs.

Maximum width sizing on an embroidered pocket sized logo is generally around 10cm (4" in old money) although we can often go a bit bigger. Generally Howsafe do not provide large embroidered logo's on the rear of garments - a few reasons: firstly they tend to have a high volume of stitching which can pull the material of the garment resulting in pukkering and can often make the garment sag - as well as this, as the designs take so long to run on an embrodiery machine we do not feel it is fair to the majority of our customers to hold up their orders (we quote approx 7-10 days on repeat orders and aim to keep it there).

For the heatprinting process howsafe can apply pocket sized logos and full sized rear logos up to 360cm (14") although hi-vis workwear the size is decided by the stripes on the garments. The average width size for a heatprinted logo is approx 260cm (10").

Howsafe Workwear Logo Examples

Embroidery

Embroidery provides the ultimate permanent finish to your logo.

Designs like the ones featured on polo shirts and baseball caps can be produced for a small one-off cost (often one-off setup charges of £20 can be avoided with orders over a reasonable value). Embroidery adds texture and feel to your logo and is so durable than more often than not, it will outlast the garment to which it's applied. Most logos can be recreated using embroidery, however some complicated designs, for instance where a logo features a large amount of graduated colours, may not be suitable for the embroidery process. In any case you will need to supply your logo – as always the higher the quality of the logo provided will allow a stitch digitiser to interpret your design giving a superior end result.

Our in-house design team here at Howsafe can work from quality artwork, but should you be unable to supply this for any reason we can usually work from good quality printed artwork such as letterheads or compliment slips.

The one-off cost of recreating your design will be quoted to you (as above - can often be provided FOC), allowing you to decide whether you wish to proceed. To give you some idea of cost, the price for an embroidery disk (one-off charge) is £25.00 plus VAT. 

If you do not have a company logo you can simply choose from one of our range of standard fonts, set-up for designs using standard fonts is totally free of charge. Once set-up has been completed embroidery is charged per application from as little as £1.50 plus VAT. The general rule of thumb is that the more stitches the design has, the higher the individual application cost. 

Stitch Types

There are many types of stitch used with the embroidery process, but the two most common are Satin and Fill type stitches. The Satin Stitch is very basically a loop of thread and a Fill Stitch involves much more thread and is mainly used for filling in blocks of colour or for wide lettering. Both types are shown in the picture.

Howsafe will have your design made for optimum quality of the finished product not for the quickest speed on our machines.

Polo Shirt

Providing your logo

If you need your company logo recreating as accurately as possible, you will ideally need some really good artwork, preferably a vector images or high-resolution bitmap, which can be sent via email or disk/memory stick etc.

Your printing or vehicle signwriting suppliers should be able to supply you upon request a suitable file if you don't have anything available.

If you are unsure what to ask for, you should request a 'vector' image in one of the following file formats:

  • EPS (Encapsulated Postscript)
  • PDF (Portable Document Format)
  • CDR (Corel Draw)
  • AI (Adobe Illustrator)
  • SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic)

If you are unable to provide a vector image we can work with high resolution (300dpi) bitmap (raster) images in the following formats:

  • JPG/JPEG (Joint Photographics Experts Group)
  • PNG (Portable Networks Graphic)
  • WEBP 
  • AVIF (AV1)
  • BMP (Windows Bitmap)
  • TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
  • GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)

If you do not have the above, don’t worry, we may be ok with some good quality printed artwork from a brochure or a letterhead - we have even been able to work from a picture of a side of a vehicle in the past. 

Vector Graphics vs Bitmaps

Vector graphics are far better for embroidery and print design because they can be resized and scaled infinitely without any loss of quality. This means that you could use the same source file to produce a business card or a huge banner on the side of a building. Unlike vectors, bitmaps are made up of small coloured dots called pixels. Whilst these bitmap images are perfectly ok for things like photographs, they will degrade in quality when resized, with smooth lines and curves becoming jagged as the pixels are stretched. Imagine getting very close to a television screen where you can see the little dots that make up the image.    

File Formats Examples

Safety helmet pricing

Option 1. Howsafe can apply a sticker type logo onto the front of our range of safety helmets (ABS plastic helmets only as we find that stickers do not bond well to polyethylene helmets). There is no minimum order for this service.

Option 2. JSP can offer highest quality ‘branding’ direct onto the helmet. This offers a razor-sharp image with increased longevity.

Please call us on 01733 560669 or email [email protected] for more information.

Pricing

Pricing in the logo-application industry is generally geared towards larger orders which can significantly reduce the per-garment logo cost.

Howsafe is happy to handle all sizes of orders and are happy to quote you a fixed price. While costs do come down as quantities increase, purchasers of smaller orders can expect fair pricing rather than being penalised heavily.

Please contact us today for a free no obligation quote by calling (01733) 560669 or email your requirements through to [email protected]

How many garments do I need?

If you’re going to invest in the right kit you need to consider what the garments are going to be subjected to, how often they will be washed and how many days of the week they will be worn.

Howsafe stick to tried and tested good quality products from the top manufacturers; our company policy is not to go out and source the cheapest products we can find, but the best quality products that offer great value for money for the customer. If you’re looking for at least a good year of wear and the garments will be worn during a five day week it is advisable to go for 5 polo shirts, 2-3 sweat shirts and 2 pairs of trousers.

Howsafe Workwear

Deadlines

Delivery times in the industry can vary greatly.

We often hear of orders taking up to 12 weeks to complete. Even if a supplier can promise speedy turnaround of embroidery or printing you should take into account whether they are able to supply the garments in a timely manner.

Howsafe carries very high stock levels on its main lines, usually enabling us to complete your off-the-shelf order within 7-10 working days (often quicker). This excludes new orders where artwork approval might be required and orders for special order garments. If you need it quicker, let us know and we will see what we can do!

Once we know your exact requirements we will ask you to fill out an embroidery/printing form, this allows us to keep your requirements on file so that next time you order we have your design ready to go.

Notes for your consideration

Although adding staff names looks great, what happens if the employees leaves before their garments have been issued or if the garments don’t fit ? - if it has not got a name on you can simply issue it to somebody else.

Consider trying garments before you buy to ensure sizing is correct - different manufacturers have different sizing i.e. a 2XL in a Kustom Kit garment may be a different size to a 2XL in a Fruit of the Loom garment. Howsafe have one of the best workwear shops in the country - just pop over to discuss your options and try sizing. For business within 25 miles of Peterborough an Account Manager is able to visit you to run through options.

The Workwear Store

Howsafe’s Workwear Store is open to the public. From rugged branded workwear and warm outerwear to the area’s largest display of safety footwear, thousands of products are waiting to be snapped up and wrapped up. Avoid the queues in town and park right outside the door at Units 18-20 Challenger Way, Edgerley Business Park, PE1 5EX.

You will be able to browse and try on our full range of workwear, safety equipment and safety footwear. Changing room facilities are available.

We are open Monday to Friday from 8:00am to 5:00pm and Saturday 9:00am to 1:00pm.