You want the people at your company to be a team, whether it’s on the sales floor, at a convention or at a fun company outing. A great way to do this is by giving employees quality merchandise customized with your brand or company’s name or logo. By providing your employees with jackets, puffer vests, polos or anything else, your crew will look sharp and united as they represent the organization.
Many businesses offer customized clothing services. The number of these businesses has only grown in the age of e-commerce, where people can go online and order a custom t-shirt in a few minutes. But those one-off services aren’t always the best option for corporate orders.
It’s both smarter and safer to order from outlets that focus on bulk orders for small businesses up to large corporations. One of the popular ones is Merchology, which specializes in various clothing, accessories and corporate gifts. While they’re a good company with solid values, it’s still good to check out Merchology's competitors to see if you can find one that better suits your needs.
There are many alternatives to Merchology available that offer customized apparel and promotional products, including SanMar, Thread Fellows and our company, Thread Logic. Let’s take a look at the similarities and differences between Merchology and Thread Logic.
Selection
Merchology and Thread Logic each have a solid list of brands and clothing style options available. They also both offer an assortment of bags, such as backpacks, totes, briefcases and more. But that’s essentially where the similarity ends.
In addition to clothing and accessories, Merchology also carries a large selection of non-apparel merch that includes drinkware (tumblers, mugs), stationery (notebooks, pens), electronics (flash drives, speakers) and a bunch of other promotional items.
It’s good to diversify a product range, but it can come with drawbacks. Offering everything from clothing to electronics can broaden a company’s overall reach, but it can sometimes mean having a smaller inventory for apparel. As a result, it could be more likely for people to see certain clothing items going out of stock more quickly at Merchology than at a company like Thread Logic.
Specialties
Merchology utilizes a number of different customization processes depending on the product types. Some of their techniques include embroidery, screen printing, heat transfer printing and digital printing. Thread Logic takes a different approach and focuses exclusively on embroidery, utilizing a rigorous inspection process before products leave the shop.
Differences Between Screen Printing and Embroidery
Some Merchology items can’t be embroidered, which means that in many cases they use screen printing. Embroidery and screen printing are very common in the apparel industry, but they’re quite different.
In basic terms, embroidery is when designs are stitched into the fabric with thread, while screen printing is when ink is printed on top of the fabric. Here are a few pros and cons of both:
- Embroidery is good for all fabrics: Embroidery tends to be used largely with dense and tough fabrics, while screen printing works very well for lighter materials. However, embroidery can be used on more delicate fabrics as well with great results.
- Screen printing can accommodate large sizing: Screen printing is better for large designs and embroidery is better for smaller, super-sharp logos.
- Embroidery offers high quality: Generally, embroidery is of higher quality and lasts longer because it’s stitched into the fabric while screen printing only adds ink on top of the material. Embroidery also tends to be a quicker process than screen printing.
Pricing
Merchology and Thread Logic have competitive prices depending on the brands, style of attire and materials. Where things start to diverge is the approach each company takes with customization.
Merchology will put embroidered logos onto clothing for free up to a maximum of 10,000 stitches, at which point the price can go up. Thread Logic uses flat-rate pricing on services and doesn’t set prices using stitch counts or time spent on the embroidery process.
The final result may lead to comparable pricing depending on the order you place, but the difference in pricing strategy is worth noting before you make a major purchasing decision.
Need Customized Apparel? Trust Our Embroidery Experts
At Thread Logic, we believe your logo is more than a nice image. It’s a part of your company’s story and deserves to be treated with care. When you want apparel customized with your business’ logo, embroidery is the way to go.
The design is stitched right into the fabric and provides a durable, long-lasting logo that’ll look good for years to come. You can trust that your apparel will be customized by embroidery artisans and will always be carefully inspected to ensure that it meets our high standards before you receive the final product.
Browse our apparel options now and start getting some ideas! If you have any questions or need any information, you’re always welcome to contact us. You’ll talk with a real person who’s ready to provide any assistance.