For clothing repair
We have to deal with different types of materials: from the finest silk and chintz to thick denim and stubborn fleece.
Therefore, we chose the Japanese sewing machine manufacturer Juki. Juki has a long history: it was founded back in 1938. Since then, its sewing equipment has been in strong demand in Russia, Europe and the USA. The DDL-8700 Juki straight-stitch industrial sewing machine excels at sewing all types of light and medium-sized fabrics. The stitching is of high quality, the seams are highly durable.
Simpler work, no less in demand in our production - decorative operations, darning, scalloping, straight, elastic and overlock stitches, buttonhole sewing, sewing in some types of zippers - we perform on a Janome JK 220s - a sewing machine from another well-known Japanese manufacturer.
Necessary equipment for organizing sewing production
At first, you will need (with some variations) the following technological devices:
- straight-stitch two-needle lockstitch sewing machines;
- straight-stitch single-needle sewing machines; overcasting machines;
- button machines for sewing on buttons and labels;
- edge stitching machines (overlockers);
- loop machines for making straight loops; sewing machines for processing pockets;
- electric cutting knives equipped with disc blades;
- steam generators;
- irons;
- duplicating presses.
It should be borne in mind that if you want to expand production, you will have to face new costs.
Thus, the production of 150-200 units of ready-made clothing per day will require an investment of 150 thousand dollars. And this, you see, is already very substantial money.
It is clear that such production rates cannot be achieved immediately and rarely can anyone start with such volumes. Also, growing production volumes will require the purchase of new equipment.
For repairing leather and fur products
High quality repairs of leather and fur products are provided to us by the Aurora GP-202 HM furrier machine . It was made in China, but in this case it is the same China that successfully displaces well-known European brands. Aurora furriers are used not only in clothing repair shops, but also in the textile, leather, hat and fur industries. Aurora allows you to sew furs of any thickness and leather of medium weight. At the same time, the machine provides extremely delicate work with products.
Also, when working with leather jackets, sheepskin coats and fur coats, we use a Juki DDL-8700 sewing machine and a Bernina 880DL overlocker.
Setting up customer flow
The first thing to take care of is the sign. Let it be big, bright, noticeable from afar. Post promotional posters around the area before opening. An effective measure is a flyer with a discount for the bearer. This will attract the first visitors and clients.
The flow of customers directly depends on the operating hours of the establishment. Consider your work schedule before you open your studio. It is important that you have it open at the time the standard business day ends (5-6 pm). Then, when returning home, many people will be able to visit you. It is no coincidence that sewing workshops work quite long hours - from 9 am to 8 pm.
Business consultants who know how to open a clothing tailoring and repair shop recommend a clever trick for promoting the sewing business - partnerships with nearby clothing and fabric stores. Tell them about your services and ask them to recommend the studio to clients who need clothing adjusted to size, as well as custom tailoring. And your clients will increase significantly.
Come up with a motivation system for partners. These could be large discounts on your services, holiday gifts, or cash rewards. For example, give them a certain percentage of the order or pay bonuses for each new client.
Often stores agree to cooperate without motivation. After all, thanks to the services of the studio, they can provide the client with a ready-made solution to his problem. And having a solution, the buyer is more willing to accept the product, even if it does not fit correctly and needs to be hemmed. In this way the store increases sales. And your partnership will only benefit him.
For repairing and sewing bags, leather goods
In our studio you can qualitatively repair a leather bag. This would have been impossible if not for a special sleeve-type sewing machine for working with leather GOLDEN WHEEL CS-335U (made in the USA). This machine allows you to professionally stitch a zipper into your bag, sew high-quality handles, replace the lining, etc. The machine works on medium-density leather.
Other equipment for sewing production.
If you are interested in sewing outerwear of the coat group, then you will need a table hood and a steam generator - a heat exchanger for producing water vapor; as well as simple irons for ironing lining.
A press is also necessary.
Designed for crimping adhesive fabric on clothing parts. Some craftsmen manage to use an iron for these purposes.
If your goal is to sew several finished products per day. And each of them consists of a dozen parts necessary for cutting. You can waste a lot of time and effort...
Since mass tailoring is the key to a successful enterprise, you will need a good vertical cutting knife. They can be either stationary or portable.
For convenience, it is advisable to have both options.
The organization of clothing production cannot be called successful if several important aspects are not taken into account. Their list includes finance, personnel selection and, of course, the fleet of equipment necessary for the production process.
As practice shows, most often, the organization of sewing production is carried out by people who are already familiar with the sewing business. There are few random people in this business.
It is also known that to organize the production of garments in the amount of 50-70 pieces per day, you will need a financial investment of 10 thousand dollars.
For overcasting and processing cuts
Another example of specialization. Although our sewing machines are capable of making overlock stitches, we decided to entrust this task to a separate performer - Bernina and Kansai overlockers.
Bernina was founded in Switzerland back in 1890. Even if we do not take into account its long history, the name of the country of origin speaks for itself. The Bernina 880DL allows us to process all major types of fabrics and even thick and multi-layered materials.
Kansai Special 21UK is an industrial overlocker manufactured by Morimoto Mfg. Co. This Japanese company was created more than 50 years ago. Today it exports its equipment to 88 countries. In short, a well-known manufacturer with a good reputation.
Sewing tools and supplies
There are a lot of tools and accessories for sewing. Some make the seamstress’s manual work easier, while others increase the capabilities of the sewing machine. For example, a marking tool will allow you to accurately transfer a pattern onto fabric, and a special foot with a “wheel” will make it possible to sew high-quality leather clothes on a household sewing machine. Special tailor's scissors and a transparent template ruler are simply an indispensable tool for a cutter and, like other sewing tools, will make your work better and more professional.
For ironing and steaming
To give the products the correct shape after repair or alteration, so that the curtains and bed linen we sew look perfect, our studio uses the Comelux Maxi C5 - a professional ironing table with electric heating, vacuum and steam generator. This ironing table is a product of the Italian company Comel, which has specialized in the production of equipment for wet-heat treatment since 1975. In more than 30 countries around the world, Comel products are valued for their high reliability and high-quality results. We fully agree with these high assessments.
Selecting a profile
Before opening a studio, it is advisable to decide on the direction of the services provided.
The very first step is planning. Before opening a studio, you need to choose the direction of its activity and determine the list of services. You can do only repairs or include tailoring in the list of services. The experience of practitioners shows that it is more profitable to choose a mixed direction. This way you definitely won’t be left without orders.
Tailoring is a more profitable niche than repairs. But there is also a greater risk of “burning out.” To sew clothes to order, you need high-class craftsmen. If to repair clothes it is enough to hire several average-level seamstresses, then for individual tailoring you need to hire high-class cutters and fashion designers. And there will be much more demands on seamstresses.
Sewing requires more specialized equipment. This means that before opening your own studio, you will have to collect more impressive starting capital. And even if all these requirements are met, the risk of being left without clients is much greater than in the case of clothing repair.
After all, repairs are a common household need, and individual tailoring is an exclusive service. And it’s not cheap, so not everyone can afford it. And those who can afford it place high demands on the studio.
For all types of repairs
To provide truly high-quality clothing repair services, it is necessary that all consumables are always at hand. The customer does not have to wait for the threads to be “stock ordered”. He won't fit "in a week" because the particular type of zipper needed to repair his jacket has run out. For these reasons, Mobile Tailor always has a large assortment of consumables in stock: zippers, buttons, various fasteners, threads of different colors and densities, fabrics, leather scraps, adhesives, tapes, ribbons, elastic bands, etc. Mobile Tailor always has everything. Therefore, it does not make anyone wait, thereby fully justifying its name.
Are you planning to open a sewing studio?
In fact, the question of the load on the equipment and the thickness of the wallet are the two main issues when choosing. And one is directly related to the other.
In most cases, a small atelier has one cutter with golden hands and two or three seamstresses with no less golden hands, and even then not since the opening of the business. Why golden hands? Because a seamstress in such an atelier is both a Swiss and a reaper and a player on the pipe - and sweep, and process the edge, and iron, and... all of the above (if necessary) and also select the fabric, style, cut, and sometimes even baste - this requires even more skilled hands, the hands of a cutter, doesn’t it?
Well, translated into the time the craftswomen work with machines and mechanisms, this tells us that out of an eight-hour working day, these machines and mechanisms work about two-thirds of the time at best. That is, the load, to put it mildly, is far from critical. And if this is so, then why pay disproportionately for increased machine performance, and sometimes for the brand? Based on these thoughts, here is what I would like to suggest:
Lockstitch sewing machine JACKJK-8720 complete with a table and a servomotor with a positioner (a function that definitely facilitates the work of a seamstress in a wide variety of operations, and the servomotor allows you to more smoothly regulate the sewing speed) - 3 pieces for 11,900 rubles - since we talked about three seamstresses a little earlier .
The machines come with a repair kit consisting of a needle plate, a rack and a presser foot, allowing you to sew medium and medium-heavy materials. - 3 pcs. somewhere around 100 rubles. In winter, we still sew more things from such fabrics, right? You cannot do without additional tuning of the car after changing the repair kit, so the joy of meeting a mechanic is included.
Five-thread overlocker JACKJK-788-5-38 complete with table and servomotor - 1 piece 23,000 rubles. A small overpayment for 5 threads will allow you to use it for edge stitches and, if necessary, for cover stitches.
So, as for sewing machines, the mandatory program, it seems to me, has been completed and the free program begins:
Coverstitch sewing machine JACKJK-8569 with servo motor and table - RUB 26,400. Well, how can a beloved client not sew something from knitwear? It's hard to refuse, no?
Lockstitch sewing machine with unison feed material JACKJK-6658 with servo motor and table - RUB 26,200.
Leather, sliding, thick coat fabrics - this is a difficult front for mechanisms of this class. It is clear that a product made of thin leather can be safely sewn on the JACKJK-8720 using Teflon-coated feet or, in extreme cases, a bar of soap in the golden hands of the same seamstresses. But the finishing seam on a leather jacket, a coat made of drape, or on a car cover, in the end, without such a machine, it most likely will not be possible to do it efficiently.
The most unpleasant part of the expense for a small studio is specialized machines - buttoning, zigzag, finishing. Using a household machine is not the worst option in this case, but I still don’t think it’s worth saving on such a machine. Something like PfaffSelekt would be a pretty decent choice. The cost is around 20,000, if my memory serves me correctly.
Now is the time, in my opinion, to pay attention to cutting and WTO: Cutting table with additional shelf CP-3000 - 23,500 rubles.
As practice shows, a cutting table is never enough. To urgently correct something in a finished cut at the moment when the fabric for a new one is laid out - well, how can we do without it? Therefore, the choice here can only be limited by the size of the room. SR-3000 is given here as an example, nothing more.
Let me not dwell on tailor's scissors, centimeters, rulers, mannequins, crayons - this is worthy of separate consideration, I'm afraid, much more carefully than sewing machines.
But, say, a cutting machine with a vertical knife MAXDOMSK-6 - 10,700 rubles, is quite capable of making life easier for the cutter and leaving a little extra time for more important operations.
Duplicate heat press JACKJK-TW62 – RUB 18,800.
Is it possible to do without it? In general, yes, if you use the seamstress's time to duplicate with an iron. But is this justified? After all, time has an amazing property - it moves so quickly that sometimes you don’t even notice it.
And finally
ironing table with heated working surface and vacuum suction, supercharging, built-in automatic continuous steam generator and iron BIEFFEBF200CE - 31,850 rubles, quite a worthy option for consideration.
And some more lyrics at the end. All of the above hardware is not a final and irrevocable option. There are simply too many specific nuances in the work of any studio, and therefore write to us, call us, we will help in any way we can!
Sincerely, Konstantin Grigoriev (www.grenada-s.ru).
PS. Prices are as of May 2013. Our phones...
The sewing business will generate income only if you have high-quality and reliable equipment. It comes in two types: household and industrial.
In addition, you will need specialized machines and additional devices, for example, steam generators, presses, overlockers, etc. The choice depends on the financial capabilities of the owner and the scale of production.
Household sewing equipment is more suitable for private tailoring, as well as small-scale production or clothing repair. Such machines and overlockers do not have much power and can simply fail under heavy loads. Reliable innovative sewing equipment and accessories contribute to the fast and high-quality production of clothing. The modern market allows you to choose the most suitable options from a huge number of offers. There are mechanical, robotic and computerized models; accordingly, the price range is quite wide. Experts recommend purchasing computerized machines for home use; they, of course, have a decent price and are expensive to maintain, but they provide a lot of additional advantages. Regarding the overlocker, the ideal option would be a five-thread one, although you can take a three-thread one. You can use the most ordinary iron at home.
It is much more difficult to select production equipment for sewing large batches of clothes. Here it is important to take into account the specifics of the chosen direction.
