This embroidery tip is all about quoting embroidery designs for your customer while they wait? Do you ever have a customer that brings in designs that they want you to reproduce? Of course, you do. Do they want a price while they wait? Sure they do. Have you ever wondered how you can be quoting embroidery designs for your customer without having to go to your digitizer to find out how many stitches there would be in that design?

I came up with a system that is fairly simple for quoting embroidery designs and it works great for me and has worked for the past 20 years. I started creating my system by typing in letters at different sizes into my digitizing system to find out what the stitch count would be. Of course, each style is a little bit different but for the most part, it worked. I averaged out the different letters and here is my result.

  • 1/4″ letter = 150 stitches
  • 1/2″ letter = 200 stitches
  • 3/4″ letter = 350 stitches
  • 1″ letter = 500 stitches
  • 1 1/4″ letter = 600 stitches

These are the sizes that I have always used the most. If you add up all of the letters in the design by the size and multiply them by the number of stitches, you will have the stitch count for the lettering.

To figure the other areas in a design, there are approximately 1600 fill stitches in a square inch. These of course vary with the pattern and length of your stitch, but this is an average.
Satin borders are approximately 175 stitches per inch. This again is an average, it depends on the density of your stitch. You must also remember to add a little extra for underlay stitching but this will at least give you a starting point and it will make it much easier to look at a design and give a quick quote while the customer waits!

Do you have a method for quoting embroidery designs that you have used that has worked great for you? I would love to hear about it!  You can learn more about quoting embroidery designs at the Embroidery Business Academy. 

Joyce Jagger
The Embroidery Coach