Run by Ian Widdowson and his wife Deborah, Premier Embroidery offers a confidential and high quality service to all its customers - whether this is commissioned work for large brands, embroidery for screen printers who are unable to do it themselves, or just lending a hand to the one-man-bands of the industry.

Ian and Deborah set the company up eight years ago in a small unit in Nottingham. The suggestion actually came from Ian's accountant, who knew that Ian had an interest in textiles and who told him the business was for sale. Like all businesses, things were tricky to begin with, recalls Ian. "When we started out we struggled for 18 months - we were newly married, we had a young baby and we struggled to establish ourselves, waiting for the phone to ring," he says. Ian admits that they've had a few lucky breaks along the way, but says most of the success they are currently enjoying is due to customers knowing they can rely on Premier. "And so, when we get new customers we tend to keep them," he adds.

Customers are also drawn to the friendly feel that comes from Premier Embroidery being a family run business. Aside from Ian and Deborah, one of Ian's brothers, Robert, is a machine operator, while the other, Simon, runs Medway Clothing, a garment supplier to the trade. Then there is Claire, the office manager, and two other machinists, Gwen Patterson and Claire Hobster. All three machinists have just embarked on an NVQ training programme. "It's important that staff feel good about what they're doing," says Ian. "This programme helps boost morale and fine-tune skills and a happy workforce ultimately leads to happy customers."

Through word of mouth and recommendation, Premier has expanded over the years, going from having just one ageing Barudan machine in 2000, to having a six-head Happy, an eight-head Happy and a single-head Happy machine. And last year it invested in a state-of-the-art eight-head Barudan, the quality of which is second to none, says Ian. With this equipment Premier Embroidery is capable of producing between 4,000 and 5,000 garments a week, depending on the size of the embroidery - not bad going for a company of its size.

Quality control

But even working flat out, Premier is careful to ensure its standards are maintained, as the high quality of the work carried out is central to the company's success. This is a lesson Ian learnt very early on in the business, as he explains:  "I was doing some caps for a customer, and at the time I was desperate for work. But the embroidery wasn't very good and I really should have stopped the job and told the customer it wasn't working, but I didn't. We just thought we'd get it done and everything would be okay, but the customer wasn't happy and I ended up out of pocket.

"That taught me a crucial lesson - that quality is key and if anything isn't right you should stop straight away and resolve it. Needless to say, that wasn't a lesson I'll need repeating."

Most of the work Premier does is contract embroidery, but since re-launching its website about a third now comes from the end user. Some might see this as unusual, but Premier insists it is actually quite common in the embroidery industry. "There is no conflict of interests as the work generated from the website comes from all over the country, and is always handled sensitively," says Ian.

Quality control is important in any job, but because Premier Embroidery handles a lot of logo work and uniforms with staff names on, attention to detail is even more important. So all work goes through a series of checks with different staff members and the company's mistake rate is extremely low, says Ian.

Digitising is another important aspect of the company's work is carried out by the skilled team at Embroidery Design Services. Using a digitiser in the UK rather than overseas helps simplify the production process, says Ian - a simple phone call is all that is needed should something need altering slightly. It also helps speed up turnaround times  - one of the reasons the embroidery industry is still alive in the UK today, adds Ian.

Although the country is in the grip of an economic downturn, Premier is still busy and the orders are still coming in. Ian believes this is because people still recognise the high value of embroidery, although he is realistic about how the economic situation could affect things next year. "The Christmas to Easter period is traditionally its quietest, so if we are going to feel it we will feel it then. In which case we will probably have to be a bit keener on price, which would be a shame because we are driven by producing high quality work using the highest quality materials."

But there's no escaping the feeling of uncertainty that surrounds most industries right now, and so, like many other decorators, Premier is feeling the need to diversify its offering. "For instance, we do embroidery work for a cricket club and through a contact there we have picked up an order for base layer garments, which we will decorate using a heat press," explains Ian. "It's not something we'd normally do but if someone asks us to do something different we always say ‘yes' where we can."

Premier also has a few customers in the schoolwear sector, which it picked up when one of its customers, a schoolwear supplier, retired. But, says Ian, schoolwear is quite a specialised market and not one that Premier will necessarily be actively pursuing in the future. "It's very competitive, especially with the cheap uniforms on offer from the supermarkets," he says.

Instead, as Ian sees it, Premier's future lies in the Internet business - building up its workwear customers and small businesses, and also continuing to build good relationships with printers and marketing agencies. With no sales rep to drive business, much of this is reliant on word of mouth or recommendation, but a lot of work is being done to steer traffic towards the site. "We are working on boosting the rankings but at the moment we come up first if you type in ‘commission embroidery' to Google, which we're pleased about," says Ian.

Whatever direction the business goes in, one thing will remain the same, and that is the team's approach to customer care and high standards, says Ian. "We are here to take away all the hassle of production from our customers. Whatever the customer wants, we can sort it, whether it is embroidery or print and embroidery, whatever - just send us the work and let the experts sort it out!"

Tel: 0115 9861988

Web: www.premierembroidery.co.uk

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