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Historical First for Wimbledon

Hundreds of items personalised each day using EmbroideryStudio e4 Lettering with Kiosk

Wimbledon offers personalised merchandise using Wilcom

We absolutely love seeing our embroidery software put to hard work, and with 200-300 merchandise items machine embroidered a day, we can say EmbroideryStudio e4 Lettering with Kiosk was right on the ball. (Kiosk feature is automatically included in EmbroideryStudio e4 Designing or Decorating)

We chatted to Paul McNamee from Embroidery Training Ltd, the organisers of the embroidery booth at Wimbledon.

How did the idea of a merchandise embroidery personalisation booth at Wimbledon came about?

The original idea came from the merchandising department of the The All England Lawn Tennis Club (Championships) Limited. They wanted to trial on-site personalisation for the first time during the tournament. They already offered personalisation of their famous championship towels but only via online sales and done through a third party embroiderer.

Towel & cap personalisation with Wilcom

How did you go about making it happen?

My first visit to Wimbledon was back in November 2017, where we demonstrated the process of personalisation and to see if the space and time required was actually viable. This initial demo proved the point that it was indeed possible to turn around fast personalisation of both towels and caps while customers waited. The idea was to only offer a “while-you-wait” service as kiosk space for stock was at a premium.

After subsequent visits to discuss the layout of machines, PCs, consumables and also staff training, I was given the confirmation that personalisation would be part of the Wimbledon merchandising effort.

Personalisation booth at Wimbledon full of people looking to purchase

How difficult was it to manage the booth?

During the Championships, personalisation ran from 10.30am when the public first entered, up until 8pm every day. 7 staff (including myself) ran the kiosk. We had 3 HappyJapan HCS2-1201 machines, 2 of them set up to run towels, and one to run caps. 

The first week was the busiest with all 3 machines running mostly all day! We ran approximately 200-300 personalisations a day!

Interested in launching your own personalised embroidery kiosk? Contact your local Wilcom distributor now and have a chat about how EmbroideryStudio e4 can make this a reality.

EmbroideryStudio e4 makes the world’s favourite digitizing software even better. It is the embroidery software choice for professional digitizers, custom embroidery shops, industry trainers and educators and apparel decorators, who are serious about commercial embroidery.

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