Printwear & Promotion The Total Promotional Package
With clientele ranging from the police services and the NHS to the Thin Blue Paw Foundation there was inevitably going to be a fascinating story behind Springers Personalised Products. P&P assistant editor, Cameron Beech speaks to co-owners and couple, Jenny Preston and Adrian Smith, to find out about this story.
Since being established in 2001, family run business, Springers Personalised Products has supplied embroidered garments to a variety of sectors. Everything from school uniform to patches and badges for the services and charities. But where did Springers first begin? The company, poetically named after the couple’s love for and ownership of springer spaniels was sure to have an equally interesting inception story. And that they do!
Where it all began
Prior to her work in embroidery, co-owner of Springers, Jenny Preston, worked as a police officer and police dog handler for Kent Police. However, Jenny’s fascination for sewing and crafts, is where the story of Springers begins. Jenny told me she knew she always wanted an embroidery machine, and as fate would have it, a Brother PR-600 had just come onto the market for £5,000. To this day, that same machine remains part of the Springers family, now 23 years old. Jenny humorously said: “When I had it serviced, they said they had only seen one other machine with more hours on it.”
Before Springers became Springers, Jenny would attend craft fairs and horse shows, taking her embroidery machines in trailers to embroider saddle cloths, which she would continue to do for the next four years. From here, her hobby of crafting and sewing only expanded; while Jenny began her embroidering venture from home in a singular sewing room, this later developed into a workshop in the couple’s back garden and has now evolved into a workspace headquartered at an old aerodrome from the WWII airfields in Hawkinge, the couple signed for in 2015. When the couple leased a second unit, all the business’s embroidery machines moved over, while the printing equipment remained at home. Springers was officially on the expansion.
Building an empire of machines
Over the decades Springers has been running, the company has built an impressive empire of embroidery machines, including a Brother PR-600, a Brother PR-670E, a ZSK Sprint 4 and a ZSK Racer 2. The reason for the collection was all to do with their individual advantages. Jenny explained: “The machines all have their own uses. The Brothers I tend to use for the small, personalised garments, with the Sprint we do a lot of epaulettes and patches for the services, and the school uniform mainly goes on the Racer. It’s easier to do particular things on particular machines.”
Jenny later spoke in greater detail about the particular reasons for assigning each machine a specific area of embroidery. She said: “The Brother doesn’t remember the designs. When you load the design into a Brother, unless you specifically save it, it forgets it. If you are loading lots of different names, it doesn’t remember them, whereas if you put them on either the Sprint or the Racer, it remembers them, but then you have to go through and manually delete them all. It’s just another thing you’ve got to remember to do before starting on the next one, because otherwise the lots of designs clog up the machines.”
One machine which clearly stood out among the rest, not just for its sheer size, but its rapid capabilities, was the Racer. With its four heads and 18 needles working across each head, seeing the machine in action put into the perspective the sheer capabilities possible on the Racer.
Jenny explained the benefits the Racer presented in relation to production times. She said: “Most of the schoolwear I do uses those 18 colours, I only have to change a couple every now and again. Most of the time I can swap between schools without having to rethread the machine, which makes a huge difference in production.”
However, as Adrian Smith, Springers’ other co-owner, later explained, the reservation of the Racer for a specific set of 18 thread colours works in tandem with the functions of the other machines. Jenny explained: “The advantage of having the other machines is that they are all loaded up with the alternatives, so that if somebody does walk in, we can generally fit the job on one of our machines.”
Learning your tools
After seeing the array of logos and designs the company embroiders, I asked Jenny about Springers’ relationship to digitisation, whether they do it in-house or outsource to an external digitiser. From this question, Jenny mentioned the importance of finding someone who works to your liking, if outsourcing is your preferred option. She said: “You’ve got to find somebody who works how you want it to be, because not all digitisers digitise it how you like it.”
Jenny later added: “I do a lot myself, but I now outsource a lot because I can earn more money than the time it takes for me to do it myself. The only ones I don’t send away to be digitised are single colours that need carving on them because nobody’s going to know what you actually want. If you send a silhouette of something, you’ve got to imagine what the details are.”
It was clear from my conversation with Jenny that it is integral to find a balance between when to take matters into your own hands, and when to pass the task on.
to 11 primary schools
An accidental introduction
It was interesting to learn that the company’s venturing into school uniform was entirely accidental, stemming from a conversation with a PTA asking to supply the uniform when someone else could not. The couple then became contract embroiderers for a local gentleman’s outfitters that supplied school uniform, taking on some of the PTA’s schools when he retired. Since then, the company has been supplying school uniform to 11 primary schools.
Because of the unpredicted expansion, the couple had to think quick in order to remain efficient. Prior to this, they had been using three single heads including a, 15 needle embroidery machine. The 15 needle machine would be constantly going for weeks with just one school’s uniform on it because Jenny admitted she couldn’t embroider the logo on the other two embroidery machines as the design featured 14 colours. This was the final push the couple needed to purchase the Racer, from Printwear & Promotion LIVE! 2022. Jenny admitted: “I knew I wanted one, I had known I wanted one for ages, but it was space.”
Well, it’s a good thing the couple took the plunge with the investment, because the request for school uniform has only been rising. Jenny spoke of the rise in school uniform purchasing and especially in the post-COVID era. Jenny described the rising trend in schools opting for hoodies and a changing attitude to retail. Jenny said: “People’s attitude to buying has changed as well. Just post-COVID, basket prices went up massively. Instead of ordering two jumpers for the week, parents were ordering five jumpers so kids attended in fresh clothing every day.”
As a result in rising basket prices, Jenny told me of the company’s increase in turnover. She said: “We’re 60% up from last year, which was 50% up from the previous year, and we’ve been going like that since COVID.”
Thin Blue Paw Foundation
Aside from their work in schoolwear, Jenny and Adrian also have a hand in supplying embroidered garments for the charity, Thin Blue Paw Foundation, which was set up to support, celebrate and rehabilitate serving and retired police dogs. Given Jenny’s closely-formed relationship with police dogs through her previous line of work, and the couple’s adoption of Danny, an energetic and charismatic German shepherd cross Belgian Malinois and retired police dog, it was clear from the offset why the couple choose to work with the foundation.
Safe to say to the business will not be slowing down any time soon and is looking to a happy and successful future.
