Producing Stock Patterns and Fonts
The last challenge was stock rhinestone patterns and fonts. We have been producing production-ready clip art and templates for over 17 years. You would have thought that this would have been a slam dunk for us. Not that fast. Not every vector outline is suitable for a rhinestone pattern.
You have to have the right outlines to start, and you have to balance the stone counts to make the transfer is practical. It is much easier to create great big patterns with high stone counts. Making smaller patterns with reasonable stone counts is quite a challenge.
Fortunately, we received some technical assistance from several clients that were already in the rhinestone business. With a little trial and error, one of our lead graphic designers, rapidly picked up the technique and became the resident rhinestone design expert at DAS. We storyboarded a terrific art volume of rhinestone patterns and fonts, and Stone Stencils was born.
We had a vast collection of vector artwork from our various art volumes and so we pulled the most suitable artwork and began production. We figured out a method for creating interactive rhinestone fonts and we quickly figured out that this was going to be a huge benefit to our clients. They could just type in some text using one of our rhinestone fonts and a perfect rhinestone pattern would be created, ready to cut. No conversion process.
Putting it All Together
All the pieces had come together for our rhinestone system. We already had several stock libraries of graphics that were ideal for custom rhinestone production, including Ready Art, Design Studios 1 & 2 and SmartCuts.
SmartCuts is a great fit as we had first produced this art volume for cutting simple outlines in paper for scrapbooking. It has proved to be an excellent library of simple stock outline for producing custom rhinestone patterns and appliqués. This product has become a client favorite and part of nearly every DAS Stone Stencil package.
By combining our art volumes with our popular Smart Designer add-on software for CorelDRAW, we had the ideal system for creating multi-decoration designs that combined rhinestone patterns with other processes including appliqué, embroidery, vinyl heat transfers, sublimation and direct to garment printing. This whole system was coming together.
Offering a Complete Solution
The last thing in the world I ever wanted to do was sell rhinestones. We had looked into selling Swarovski rhinestones. They were very expensive and it looked like there were plenty of sources available. After talking to clients that were already in the business, the consensus was that there were two markets. The Swarovski transfer marke, that was a premium market for bridal parties, boutiques etc… and the Korean cut crystal apparel.
The Korean stones were much less expensive, and did not erode profit margins like the Swarovski designs. They had a high perceived value, had great margins for our clients and had more “"bling for the buck" for consumers. Clients begged us to bring in Korean stones, because quality Korean stones were not readily available.
There are a lot of poor quality Korean stones on the market that are not very "blingy" and have a tendency to fall off. Our only solution was to test a variety of stones and import them directly from Korea. We found a great factory in Korea with awesome quality and great adhesion. I would have never guessed that we would be importing Korean rhinestones by the millions. If you walk into our offices, the first thing you see is our receptionist weighing and bagging rhinestone packages. You would think we were drug dealers with all of the scales and baggies!
The bottom line is that we wanted to offer a complete solution with hardware, software, artwork and supplies. It was quite a process putting this all together, but this has been a key to the success of our clients.
