How to Put Embroidery on a Shirt

If you're looking into adding custom embroidery to a shirt for your business, chances are you're looking at customizing polo shirts, dress shirts, or work uniform shirts with your company logo. Commercial embroidery works perfectly as a decoration method for all of these corporate apparel options. Here's how to get started.

1. Mock-up your design – digitize your design or logo for your custom embroidery. Make sure to consider how many needles your embroidery machine can accommodate and how many thread colors you can afford.
2. Save your design in the proper format – save your file in a format that your embroidery machine can read using your embroidery software. This is usually a ‘DSB’ or DST’ file.
3. Transfer your file to the embroidery machine – this can be done simply by using a USB cable, flash card or directly from the computer running the software.
4. Inform the machine about the design elements – the proper threads, needles, and orientation to use must be chosen in the embroidery software. Typically, each of the needles is numbered and threaded with a different color thread. Only one needle with one color will embroider at a time, so an embroidery sequence must also be scheduled.
5. Line up your shirts for embroidery – the fabric of the shirt is stretched across embroidery loops or frames and slotted into the arms of the commercial embroidery machine.
6. Commence the embroidering – once your polos, dress shirts, or work shirts are secured and your machine is programmed start the machine and let it run until your embroidery is finished!

You've now taken the first step towards customizing your own shirts! For even more information on how custom embroidery works, check out our comprehensive Guide to Custom Embroidery. Otherwise, you can head over to our Custom Headwear Buyers Guide and pick out a cap for us to embroider for you!