Would you believe that changing embroidery thread could increase your production by 20%? Recently I was asked by an Embroidery supply company to do a comparison for a company that they were working with to help increase their production. This was for a large company that embroidered monograms only. They were looking for a way to increase their production without compromising their quality.
This was a very interesting experiment. I took a basic 3 letter monogram, set it up with underlay, pullcomp and density as I normally would. I embroidered it with the normal Robison-Anton 40 weight embroidery thread No. 122. I then took the same monogram, reduced the density by 20% and sewed it out with a 35 weight embroidery thread, Robison-Anton No. 152. The images below are scanned images, They are not photographs. I wanted you to be able to see what I saw! Scanned images seem to show up more flaws than photographs.
40 Weight Thread 35 Weight Thread
I could not believe my eyes. I embroidered each one on a piece of denim at 800 stitches per minutes and there was very little visible difference in the monograms at all and with the density being 20% less, the sewing time was also 20% less. This would help to increase the production at the end of the day by 20% for the large monogram company. This is huge if you have a lot of embroidery machine heads running with different monograms!
I remember when the rage was all about having your school name embroidered on the back of corduroy jackets about 25 years ago, I embroidered the backs of all of those jackets using 30 weight embroidery thread. This cut down about 30% on stitch count and production times. Using 30 weight thread, you definitely could see a difference in the appearance, but you cannot really tell the difference in the 35 weight embroidery thread. This is very exciting to me.
I wanted to share this with you so that you could start thinking about different ways of cutting down on your production time. This would not work for very fine detail in designs but for something like jackets backs or monograms, this 35 weight embroidery thread would work great and you can cut your production down by 20%!