25th Anniversary in Digitizing

Robert Young · April 11th, 2014, 02:44 PM

not only is today my birthday, it also marks my 25th year of making a living solely in embroidery digitizing and embroidery.

I started in 1989 on a Digitrac and Melco Superstar run on paper tape. Every design would be enlarged 6x on regular copy paper and then we would tape those pcs together... then using a pencil we would actually put in each stitch by hand on the paper... one number 2 pencil lead was the same thickness as 1 40wt thread... after the paper was taped to the Digititrac we would put in nodes for each of the pencil lines we already had put in.. (in effect digitizing each design twice!) We would digitize about 80 stitches at a time.. let the machine sew those stitches, if we approved we pressed some buttons to print those stitches on paper tape... IF we did not like those stitches we deleted and repunched them! There was NO editing as we have now.

There was no internet nor email of course... but a few years later we did have a Digi-FAX... where we (for 5000.00 per location) could "email" a file from point A to point B. Yep, you needed the 5k machine as well as any client would also need the 5k machine. (wow wonder what happened to that business when email came alone!!!)

Then computers made it to our embroidery world (at least 5 yrs behind the world.. come on, how many of your machines still have disk drives!! and a new computer? NOT) Our first mid range digitizing system cost over $45,000.00 !

Yes the world has changed, Yes we cannot charge anywhere near what we used to... BUT also YES quality has gone way up in general, AND it is still a medium I thoroughly enjoy each and every day with hundreds of thousands of designs under my belt.

lrsbranding · April 12th, 2014, 12:08 AM

Robert, Happy Birthday and Happy Anniversary. I haven't been in the industry that long so it is interesting to hear how it was done before the computer.

pd87 · April 13th, 2014, 05:47 AM

Happy Birthday and Happy Anniversary,
I was two years old when you started your embroidery business. Only thing I was punching at this time, were holes in my meals.
I have the greatest respect for people like you. Who have learnt embroidery from bottom to top. You should write a book about the the things you have learnt in this 25 years of embroidery. Because a lot of the knowledge your generation has achieve will be lost after your retirement.

AlisonB · April 14th, 2014, 12:25 AM

Wow. Two milestones at once. Congratulations! I agree about writing the book. It would be a shame to lose all that experience - but TIME - where does one find the time? Hope you took the day off to relax.

Robert Young · April 29th, 2014, 12:28 PM

Thanks! I have no plans to write a book BUT I do believe lots of YouTube videos are in my future. I have been compiling a list of the top questions clients ask and have just moved into a new studio to begin producing videos to answer them. YouTube is such a great resource and very few in our industry are using it! Tutorials on digitizing techniques, editing or manipulate your machine, examples of different techinques, etc.