The "Which Embroidery Machine Should I Buy?" Thread

[tamalita]

Hello, I've been trying to investigate as much as I can about this on my own, but my inexperience has hindered my efforts so far, so I hope someone here may be able to help me...

The company I work for wants to make embroidered polo shirts for their employees, but they asked me to not only look into prices of the shirts, but to also look into acquiring a sub $2,000.00 embroidery machine that could enable us to accomplish this in-house.
This is mostly happening because buying from our local vendors you would think it's like trying to pry out their teeth (late with quotes and delivery/bad quality with high prices, etc).

We really only need the machine to embroider the logo onto polo shirts and eventually some dressier shirts to be worn by the Admin/Sales staff. Also, initially we would be embroidering about 80-100 shirts and after that we would only be doing shirts for new employees or when a shirt needs to be replaced or another big run if the design changes. Also worth noting is that we would mostly use a single color and I am a proficient user in CorelDraw (which I have heard can be used for digitizing)

Is there a machine that would fit that bill or do you think it's not worth going through all of this for company shirts and maybe eventually some promotionals. I have to admit that I asked and got permission to run personal crafts as long as it's not on company time and am always excited to learn how to do something new.

Thank you in advance!

[CES]

Hello.

I have never used an embroidery machine.  I'm a craftster and love anything with a monogram on it, so I thought perhaps this might be a wonderful toy!  Ultimately, I'd love to set up a small business monogramming, after I have a couple of years under my belt!  So, where would you direct me?  Are there classes you took prior to purchasing a machine?  What is a great machine?  I have $1,000 budget.

Any insight you can provide would be very much appreciated!

Thank you,
CES

[monaliza]

I recently bought a Brother 4500 D,both sewing and embroidery,wonderful machine.