Nailing Down the Equipment
Recently at a trade show, several competitors that sell rotary engravers for producing rhinestone stencils approached me. They had watched the crowd around our booth, and when we had a break in action, they began asking me questions about reselling our system. Their observation was that our system was much easier and more effective than the current rotary engraving system solution they were selling from a major equipment supplier. This was a great compliment, but like everyone else, they only focused on the equipment.
We have always focused on solutions. This is why we do not open our system up to resellers. Without the human touch of our support and training, we cannot provide a solution that insures the success of our clients. Owners of engraving systems often tell us “I wish I had know about your system before….”. The really uncomfortable situation is when someone has just laid out $40,000 on a rhinestone setting machine and they see our system at a trade show. We keep a Kleenex box around for these situations.
You can produce the same transfers with the DAS Stone Stencils System using a cutter as you can with an expensive and complicated setting machine. In fact, the DAS Stone Stencil System is faster than many setting machines on simple designs. A cutter based solution has many advantages over engravers and setting machines. Since we had been selling cutters for years, we already had the perfect equipment line up with our SmartCutter series of vinyl cutters. The ability to go back to our existing cutter clients and offer them a system was an exciting opportunity.
Developing a Software Solution
The next challenge was the software. Having taught CorelDRAW for years, I first thought that we would be able to create patterns in CorelDRAW. Wrong! This was a huge hassle. We tried all kinds of techniques, even consulting the experts at Corel Corporation. Creating a circle pattern with the Artistic Media tool stunk. The circles would always be the same spacing. Using the Interactive Blend tool to blend circles along a path worked a bit better, but was still a huge hassle as you had to create every line segment separately and you still had to do a manual adjustment of each pattern. Finally, we figured out that the easiest way to produce rhinestone patterns in CorelDRAW was to copy circles along a path manually. What a drag, this was not going to fly.
Fortunately, we had been selling our CoCUT Pro and SmartCut pro cutting programs for years. We had thousands of happy clients that were cutting every day with these two programs. We knew that SmartCut Pro had the ideal feature set for outputting rhinestone patterns to our material, but it lacked the features to easily create rhinestone patterns.
This is a very tricky programming problem. A software needs to anchor circles at every intersection point on a vector outline. The software has to be able to determine where the intersection points are, and blend circles between each anchor point. The problem is that the distance between each anchor point is often different. This means that the software needed to change the spacing for every line segment. This was a giant math problem for our programmers. Add fill patterns to the mix, and we had a bit of a development nightmare on our hands.
Fortunately, we had developed some tool sets for the routing and milling industries that gave us a huge head start. The net result was SmartCut Pro 2.0 had the best rhinestone pattern design features on the market. The fact that we had thousands of existing users of CoCUT Pro and SmartCut Pro was an added benefit as these clients would have an upgrade path.
We are really proud of SmartCut Pro 2.0 and the development continues to make the software even better. We have big plans for adding and improving outline and fill patterns as well as adding specialized features for improving workflow and decreasing design time. This had been a very challenging development cycle, but results have been well worth the effort.
