Many people think artwork approvals are only done once, and when you get that reorder it’s just yelling down the aisle like you’re working in a diner. But what if, your customer referred to a another “Previous Order”? This could be become rather costly. In this article we explain why you always need to reapprove the art, and how Teesom makes that simple and easy to do.

In the early years of when my sister and I had our embroidery business, we did not do such a great job on getting art approved. The majority of the time I would do the digitized file and then a sew out to get the job.

We learned very quickly the reasons not to do art upfront, but we had to learn the hard way how important saving the art information for repeat jobs were.

I had digitized this great design with like 5 colors and the customer loved the shirts we did. So much so that he wanted to repeat the shirts. Problem was, I never wrote down the colors I used to run production with nor did I log any of the info about backing, the needle I used etc. Ugh, we had to ask our customer to bring in one of the shirts to compare the thread colors to, so that we could run it again. Thankfully, he was a super nice friend but that kind of made it more embarrassing for me.

No doubt, creating artwork approvals are necessary

The second lesson we learned right away was to always give the customer a proof. No matter what! We had a customer that had approved their logo once, and we just kept repeating it for them.

Then one day they called and said, “you put the wrong website on our logo”. What?!?!?! This was the design that we had done a hundred times before! How could this happen?!?! The owner Rob said, “We sent an email out to all our vendors announcing our new website last month. We figured you would update the design knowing our website was part of our logo.” In my head I thought, “Sorry, Rob, I’m just not that into you.” Nonetheless, we ended up having to compromise with them and split the difference on the order.

I was not even going to attempt the stitch eraser on a polo, although my sister (the money person) did suggest it. It was then, that it became a policy to always show, at minimum, a paper proof of what the design would look like and get whoever placed the order to approve what we were putting on the apparel items.

The moral of the story is that even though you repeat a design many many times, there will come a time when it’s not going to be right, and even though your customer will get annoyed approving it, one day he will thank you for showing him the proof.

It takes two minutes to email a proof out of Teesom and about that long for a customer to approve it. It is your insurance factor and should be part of your process, no matter what.

Now, if you do decide to repeat orders without showing a customer a proof, I would advise you to have them sign a “hold harmless” up front that says something to the effect of “we agree to allow ABC Company to repeat orders without an approval and hold them harmless should they repeat art on an order that has an incorrect logo on it.” This really gets them thinking and it makes the decision theirs not yours.

Remember, you really are not saving time by not getting an approval, if the order is done wrong, it’s done wrong. There goes the 4 minutes you saved.

When you just make it a policy, that this is what we do, your customer will come to appreciate your diligence and he’ll be able to confidently recommend you to others.