Embroidery

Embroidery stitches your logo in thread rather than printing it in ink. That single difference is why it's the standard for anything worn daily: thread doesn't crack, peel, or fade. A stitched polo will look essentially the same after two years of weekly washing, which no print can claim.

It also reads differently. On a polo, a quarter-zip, or a cap, a stitched logo looks established in a way a print doesn't — which matters when your team is standing in front of a customer. That's why we recommend it for staff uniforms, field-service crews, restaurant front-of-house, and pastoral wear, and why almost every company store we run is built around embroidered pieces.

Your logo file can't be stitched directly. It has to be digitized — converted into a stitch file that tells the machine every needle position, direction, and density. That's a skilled manual job, not a button press, and it's where embroidery quality is won or lost.

We digitize in house and run a test sew-out before production, so you see how the logo actually stitches rather than a render of it. Digitizing is a one-time cost per design. After that the file is on record and every reorder runs straight off it with no setup again — which is why your second order is cheaper than your first.

A few things thread genuinely can't do: text below about a quarter inch fills in and turns illegible, gradients become solid blocks, and very fine linework closes up. If your logo has a tagline or fine detail, it usually needs a simplified version for the chest. We'll build that and show you before anything gets stitched.

Left chest is the default — around 3 to 4 inches wide, and the placement people read as professional without thinking about it. Right chest is where a name goes if you're personalizing. Sleeve hits are small and work well for a secondary mark. Back yoke on a jacket or the back of a cap gives you room for a company name and phone number.

Caps have their own rules. A front cap design maxes out around 2.25 inches tall by 5 inches wide, and the design has to be digitized specifically for the curve — bottom-up and center-outward — or the letters lean. Trucker and one-piece-front caps have no center seam, which gives you the cleanest canvas. We covered all of it in how to embroider a hat.

One-time embroidery runs start at 24 pieces. Through an online company store there's no minimum at all — order a single polo, and new hires get outfitted the day they start.

Pricing depends on the garment and the stitch count of your logo, since a dense design takes longer on the machine than a simple one. A left-chest logo on a mid-range polo typically lands in the low-$20s per piece all in. Send us the logo and the garment you have in mind and we'll give you an exact number.

Not sure whether to stitch or print? The short version: embroider anything with a collar, print the tees. We laid out the full comparison in embroidery vs. screen printing.