Taking custom orders without the Facebook Messenger mess

A custom embroidery order almost never arrives as an order. It arrives as a message that says "do you do sweatshirts?" and then becomes forty messages over nine days, with the customer's design photo somewhere in the middle, the size mentioned once in passing, and the thread color never mentioned at all.

Then you sit down to stitch and you have to scroll back through the whole thing to reconstruct what you agreed to. That is the mess. It is not a personality flaw and it is not a small business problem you outgrow. It is what happens when a specification is collected in a medium built for chat.

What it actually costs

The obvious cost is time: re-reading threads before every job, and the follow-up messages asking for the detail nobody wrote down.

The expensive costs are the other two.

Remakes. A wrong thread color or a misspelled name is a garment you paid for, an hour on the machine, and a customer who now has to wait again.

Trust. This is the one that does real damage. When you come back three days after taking payment with "sorry, one more question," and then two days later with another one, you look disorganized to someone who is paying you for careful work. Every one of those messages spends some of the confidence that made them order in the first place. Customers rarely say anything about it. They just do not come back.

The fix is not being more responsive. It is collecting the entire specification once, before the order is confirmed.

The rule: no blanks before you say yes

Two sentences worth pinning above your machine.

An order is not confirmed until every required field has an answer. Payment received is not the same as a confirmed order.

That second one matters more than it sounds. A paid order with a blank field is still an open order. The money makes it feel settled and it is not. If you treat payment as the finish line, you will start production on jobs that still have unanswered questions in them, which is exactly how the "one more question" messages happen.

An internal note that says "decide the thread color at stitch time" is also not an answer. If the customer has not chosen it, it is a question you still owe them, not an assumption you get to make.

The required specification for an embroidered apparel order

This is the full list. Anything blank means the order is not confirmed.

• Garment type, plus sleeve length if it is a shirt
• Garment brand or quality tier, because a Gildan and a Comfort Colors are different products at different prices
• Color of the garment
• Size or sizes, with the quantity of each
• Every placement, named explicitly: front, left chest, sleeve, back, hood, and so on
• Confirmation of the placements that are empty, meaning "nothing on the front" has to be an answer the customer gave you, not an assumption you made
• Exact wording for each placement, with the spelling confirmed by the customer
• Font or handwriting for each text element, and if it is handwriting, the photo of the handwriting in hand
• Thread color for each placement
• Quantity
• Needed-by date
• Pickup or shipping, with the full shipping address if it ships
• Price agreed, and the payment terms

Adapt the list to your products. A hat order needs a crown-versus-side placement answer that a sweatshirt does not. A blanket order needs a corner-versus-center answer. The principle does not change: zero blanks before you tell someone you are getting started.

Collect it in one message, not six

The single biggest improvement you can make is asking for everything at once.

When an order request comes in, read the whole thread, list every field still missing, and send one message containing all of them. It feels like a lot to send. It is far less annoying to a customer than five separate messages over a week, and it makes you look like a shop that has done this before.

Something like this works:

Yes, I can do this. Before I write it up, I need a few details so I get it right the first time: garment color, size, the exact wording with the spelling you want, whether you want anything on the sleeve or just the front, and the thread color. Once I have those I will send you the total and a proof to approve.

Then read their answers back to them in a confirmation, in your words, before anything is stitched.

A form beats a conversation

Messages are how customers reach you. They are a poor place to collect a specification, because nothing is required, nothing is structured, and answers arrive out of order.

The durable fix is a form where the fields are required, so an incomplete order cannot be submitted at all. Three ways to get there, in increasing order of how well they hold up:

1. 1A free form tool. A general-purpose form builder, linked from your Facebook page and pinned in your listings. It costs nothing and it solves the blank-field problem immediately. The weakness is that submissions land in a spreadsheet or your email, so you still have to move them somewhere.
2. 2Listing personalization fields. If you sell on Etsy, use the personalization box and set every option you can as a real variation instead of asking people to type it. Buyers answer at checkout, which is the one moment they are paying attention.
3. 3An order page of your own with required fields per product, so wording, font, placement, thread color, and size are answered before the order exists. This is the version that also solves the tracking problem, because the answers land on the order record rather than in a submission you have to copy.

Whichever you use, one rule holds: when a customer answers in a conversation anyway, move the answer onto the order record immediately. The thread is not the record. If the only place the thread color exists is a message from last Tuesday, you have not fixed anything.

Payment terms, stated plainly

Two situations, two answers.

Consumers. Payment in full before you stitch. The reason is easy to say out loud and nobody argues with it: once a name is on a garment, it cannot be sold to anyone else. Wording that works: "Payment for custom orders is due at the time of ordering, because once I stitch it I cannot sell it to anyone else."

Established businesses and organizations. A 50 percent deposit to start production, with the balance due before pickup or delivery, is the normal trade practice in decorated apparel. Asking a business for the full amount up front reads as distrust. Wording that works: "Once we finalize the order, I ask for a 50 percent deposit to get it into production, and the balance is due before pickup or delivery." Payment terms after delivery are for established repeat accounts, never a first order.

Either way, the payment is one field on the specification. It does not confirm the rest of it.

The confirmation message

Send this only when there are zero blanks. It should be boring and easy to skim.

Confirming your order: two Comfort Colors crewnecks in ivory, size large and size medium. Front left chest reads "Harbor Lane Farm" in the script font, stitched in navy. Nothing on the sleeves or the back. Total is $124, paid in full. Ready for pickup by August 8. If anything above is wrong, tell me now, because I start stitching tomorrow.

That message does three things. It proves you understood the order, it gives the customer the last chance to catch their own typo, and it becomes the record you point back to if there is ever a disagreement.

Related reading

Once the specification is complete, the next question is where it lives so you can find it in three weeks. That is a different problem, and we wrote about it in tracking embroidery orders, and where a spreadsheet stops holding up. For what to charge, the embroidery pricing calculator shows the math per piece.

Broidry is order-management software for machine embroidery shops. Customers order from a page of your own where wording, font, placement, thread color, and size are required fields, so the specification arrives complete instead of as a conversation, and orders from Etsy, Facebook, text, and email land in the same list. There is a free plan: broidry.com.