Decorator Profile
The enchanting embroiderers: An enthralling history and promising future
With clientele ranging from the police services and the NHS to the Thin Blue Paw Foundation there was inevitably going to be a fascinating story behind Springers Personalised Products. P&P assistant editor, Cameron Beech, speaks to co-owners and couple, Jenny Preston and Adrian Smith, to find out about this story.
S
ince being established in 2001, family run business, Springers Personalised Products has supplied embroidered garments to a
variety of sectors.
Everything from school uniform to patches and badges for the services and charities. But where did Springers first begin? The company, poetically named after the couple’s love for and ownership of springer spaniels was sure to have an equally interesting inception story. And that they do!
Where it all began
Prior to her work in embroidery, co-owner of Springers, Jenny Preston, worked as a police officer and police dog handler for Kent Police. However, Jenny’s fascination for sewing and crafts, is where the story of Springers begins. Jenny told me she knew she always wanted an embroidery machine, and as fate would have it, a Brother PR-600 had just come onto the market for £5,000. To this day, that same machine remains part of the Springers family, now 23 years old. Jenny humorously said: “When I had it serviced, they said they had only seen one other machine with more hours on it.”
Before Springers became Springers, Jenny would attend craft fairs and horse shows, taking her embroidery machines in trailers to embroider saddle cloths, which she would continue to do for the next four years. From here, her hobby of crafting and sewing only expanded; while Jenny began her embroidering venture from home in a singular sewing room, this later developed into a workshop in the couple’s back garden and has now evolved into a workspace headquartered at an old aerodrome from the WWII airfields in Hawkinge, the couple signed for in 2015. When the couple leased a second unit, all the business’s embroidery machines moved over, while the printing equipment remained at home. Springers was officially on the expansion.
Building an empire of machines
Over the decades Springers has been running, the company has built an impressive empire of embroidery machines, including a Brother PR-600, a Brother PR-670E, a ZSK Sprint 4 and a ZSK Racer 2. The reason for the collection was all to do with their individual advantages. Jenny explained: “The machines all have their own uses. The Brothers I tend to use for the small, personalised garments, with the Sprint we do a lot of epaulettes and patches for the services, and the school uniform mainly goes on the Racer. It’s easier to do particular things on particular machines.”
| 62 | October 2024 Jenny pictured with PD Jabba
Jenny later spoke in greater detail about the particular reasons for assigning each machine a specific area of embroidery. She said: “The Brother doesn’t remember the designs. When you load the design into a
Thin Blue Paw Foundation logo being embroidered on the Racer 2
Brother, unless you specifically save it, it forgets it. If you are loading lots of different names, it doesn’t remember them, whereas if you put them on either the Sprint or the Racer, it remembers them, but then you have to go through and manually delete them all. It’s just another thing you’ve got to remember to do before starting on the next one, because otherwise the lots of designs clog up the machines.” One machine which clearly stood out among the rest, not just for its sheer size, but its rapid capabilities, was the Racer. With its four heads and 18 needles working across each head, seeing the machine in action put into the perspective the sheer capabilities possible on the Racer. Jenny explained the benefits the Racer presented in relation to production times. She said: “Most of the schoolwear I do uses those 18 colours, I only have to change a couple every now and again. Most of the time I can swap between schools without having to rethread the machine, which makes a huge difference in production.”
However, as Adrian Smith, Springers’ other co-owner, later explained, the reservation of the Racer for a specific set of 18 thread colours works in tandem with the functions of the other machines. Jenny explained: “The advantage of
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