Examine your interests, skills, and personality type. Do you
prefer the flexibility of working from home, or do you need the structure of working
in a retail store environment? Perhaps you'd like to take your embroidery equipment
on the road to trade shows, festivals, carnivals and other profit-making opportunities?
Once you determine the physical location of your new business, you can decide who
your customers will be, how to reach them, and what equipment you'll need.
Determine Your Niche Market
You must decide which unique and special services you can provide that will ensure
the success of your business. Talk to potential customers and perhaps even get some
advance orders.
- Who will buy your services and how often?
- Who also provides this service or something like it?
- How big is the market? What segment will you target?
- Who is the competition?
- What will it cost to produce, advertise, sell & deliver the product?
- What price can you charge? What is the markup? How much do you need to sell to make
a profit?
Choose Your Garment Decorating Equipment
It's critical to have the right equipment. Brother has been a leader in the industrial
garment decorating industry, and offers a full line of industrial embroidery machines,
software, the GT-541 inkjet garment printer, and a fully stocked parts and accessories
store (PAS). People like you rely on Brother because:
- Brother machines have a wide range of user-friendly features and capabilities -
to produce the high quality embroidery on a broad range of products
- Brother's GT-541 garment printer produces large, full-color designs right from your
computer, quickly and easily
- Brother offers online product and software help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to
keep your business up and running
- Brother offers a wide range of software options to help you digitize and edit your
own embroidery designs as well as existing designs that are rescanned or come from
an electronic file
- Brother embroidery machines can be networked together for maximum productivity
How to Reach Your Customers
From the start, it's critical that you communicate a consistent message to potential
customers.
We recommend you consider the following:
- Business Cards - get plenty and hand them
out at every opportunity
- Stationery - for letters, invoicing and
general correspondance
- Flyer/Brochure - a one page description
of your products/services should suffice in the beginning
- Press Release - send a press release announcing
the opening of your business and send it to all of your local newspapers and trade
publications
- A Web Site - creating and hosting a web
site has never been easier or cheaper
- E-mail Contact List - to announce specials,
promotions, discounts, and company news
- Advertisements - Yellow pages, local newspapers,
church bulletins, and anything else your customers read make great places to advertise.
- Promotional Items - There is a wide range
of items that you can get your logo and business message printed on, from pens and
post-its to stress balls, that you can give away to generate more business
- Networking Events/Trade Shows - the more
you network and promote your business, the more orders you will get.
