If you’re like lots of decorating businesses, you probably opened your doors with a single- or small multi-head embroidery machine, and that’s smart because embroidery has been among the top two or three most requested imprinting techniques for years. It’s durable, has a high perceived value and results in crisp, classic text and designs while also producing high-fashion and high-art embellishments on the runways.

But for your business to take the next step, consider diversifying with additional decoration techniques. It’s a great time to consider adding a direct-to-garment printer. These fast, economical printers offer your shop the perfect solution for on-demand, high-quality, full-color (and opaque white) printing on light and dark garments, with a softer hand; you can produce photo-realistic and detailed designs on multiple fabric types and colors for your clients.

Diversification is jet fuel for your business. Clients want you to be a one-stop shop for all their decorating needs. — Ed Levy

Depending on your business size, you can start with a more affordable printer and heat-press technology and grow as demand increases. Here are three ways a shop offering both embroidery and DTG can be more profitable.

1. Wow clients with multimedia (and save yourself time and money). While a 150,000-stitch embroidery design might dazzle a client with its perfect color variations and dimensional stitch types, digitizing that design and sewing it out costs time and money if you’re paying a digitizer and a machine operator. Remember, you’re looking at about 1,000 stitches per square inch of fill.

However, if you’ve been in a retail store recently, you know that multimedia designs (embroidery meets print, reverse appliqué meets nailheads and Swarovski crystals) are hot on everything from T-shirts to jackets to jeans to headwear.

When you transform a design by combining two or more decorating types, like embroidery and DTG, you create retail-worthy garments that keep your clients coming back, and you save production time and operator costs.

2. Say goodbye to slow times with diversification. Many new decorators will say they’ve hit a slow month or season, but often not for the reason they think (though you do need to connect with more customers locally, beef up your social media presence or hit up a new industry with your offerings). While those sales and marketing activities are great and should be part of your client-building repertoire, we always ask a decorator if they’ve diversified beyond the one imprinting service with which they opened their business. Being a one-hit wonder just doesn’t cut it.

Diversification is jet fuel for your business. Clients want you to be a one-stop shop for all their decorating needs. Want our best advice? If you have an embroidery machine, look at a DTG printer. (If you’ve got DTG, check out a single-head embroidery machine.)

3. It’s all about location, location, location. Location on the garment or product, that is. Again, if you scour the retail racks, you’ll see decorative elements on sleeves, pant legs and hats, and on accessories like denim bags and silk scarves. If you offer embroidery, you know you can hit different locations and substrates with stitches.

With a DTG printer, you also get access to different-sized pallets that allow you to print (with eco-friendly inks, no less) on a variety of shapes, sizes, locations and substrates, allowing you to expand your offerings.

If you never considered printing on infant wear, shoes, oversize apparel, larger textiles or coasters, now you can.

Remember, too, that decorators work in an on-demand business environment. DTG allows you to quickly and easily print multicolor images in quantities as low as one item. This is much less time-consuming than screen printing, which doesn’t allow you to do short runs of high-color designs.

Ed Levy has more than 25 years of apparel-decorating experience. The director of software technologies for Hirsch Solutions, Levy is a speaker at trade shows and regular contributor to industry magazines.