If you want your salon's logo on your capes rather than lettering, there is one question we have to ask first and it trips everyone up: what file do you have?
Best to worst, honestly
A vector file. SVG, AI, EPS or PDF. This is the artwork as shapes and curves rather than pixels, which means it can be scaled to any size without falling apart. If your designer made your logo, they have one of these. Ask them for it — it is yours.
A large, sharp raster file. A PNG or JPEG at a decent size usually works fine. A logo that is 2000 pixels wide with clean edges gives us plenty to work from.
A screenshot off Instagram. This is the one that usually is not enough. A screenshot of a profile picture is often 300 pixels across and already compressed twice; the edges are soft and the fine bits are gone. We will tell you straight away rather than stitching something disappointing.
Send whatever you have. It takes us a minute to look and we would rather tell you now than after you have paid.
What digitizing actually is
An embroidery machine cannot read a picture. It reads a stitch file — a set of instructions telling the needle where to go, in what order, in which direction, at what density. Somebody has to turn your artwork into that.
That somebody is a person, not a converter. Every satin column has to be drawn, every fill angled, every travel between shapes planned so the needle does not leave a trail across an area it has already stitched. It is closer to redrawing the logo than to converting a file.
Automatic converters exist, and they are what produce the puckered, furry, slightly wrong logos you have seen on cheap merchandise. We do ours by hand and we stitch a test before anything goes near your garments.
It is a one-time $10 fee per logo. After that the file lives on our machine and every future order uses it, at no extra cost.
What thread cannot do
Three limits worth knowing before you send anything:
Very small text. Below about 5 mm tall, letters stop being readable and start being a smudge. If your logo has a tagline in small type, it may need to come off at cape size or be set larger.
Hairlines. Thread has a minimum width — roughly 1.2 mm. A line thinner than that will not hold; it either breaks up or the thread snaps. Fine outlines usually need thickening slightly.
Photographs and gradients. Thread is a flat colour. A gradient becomes bands and a photograph becomes nothing useful. Logos with photographic elements need a simplified version for embroidery.
None of these is a refusal — they are just decisions somebody has to make, and we would rather make them with you looking than quietly on our own.
How it runs
Go to Your logo, stitched and upload your artwork there, place it on the cape or apron, and add lettering above or below if you want it. Then send us a message so we know it has landed. We come back with a mockup showing exactly what will come off the machine — including anything we have had to change to make it stitch — and nothing is sewn until you have seen it.
The minimum for logo work is four garments, capes and aprons combined.
You can see logo work alongside lettering in the gallery.