Star-News Article: Wilmington Embroidery Company Thrives Amid Recession

  

Friday, February 6, 2009
By K.J. Williams
Star-News Correspondent

Growth at Wilmington's Queensboro Shirt Co. has it straining at its embroidered girth.

Christian Battle, a logo specialist with Queensboro Shirt Co., works on a design in the business' facility in Wilmington on Thursday.

Last year, the custom-embroidery company increased net revenues to $15.2 million from 2007's $10.5 million. And, amid the recession, it's set to expand into previously unused space at its 80,000-square-foot warehouse facility at 1400 Marstellar St. Queensboro made Inc.'s 2008 list of the 5,000 fastest-growing privately owned U.S. companies.

Of the more than 160 employees, many operate the machines around the clock in three shifts, producing embroidered clothing for companies and organizations, along with digitally printed ware that bonds the ink design to the material.

"We increased our capacity by about 50 percent and, hopefully, we'll do the same this year," said owner Fred Meyers.

"We serve a niche," he said of Queensboro's largely small-business clientele. "We have a good position in that niche."

Still, Meyers notes that the recession has had an effect. "It's harder to get new customers and they're spending less, so it's definitely slowed down some, but we still expect to grow considerably this year," he said.

Kim Wilt, the company's marketing director, said Queensboro is facing the recession with an updated business plan.

Nearly all of the company's business is online from its Web site at Queensboro.com, and over the telephone.

"We've really tried to reach our customers where they are," she said, adding that the company has recently launched a Facebook page and also uses Twitter, another social networking Web site.

The business started with one box of machine-embroidered shirts 27 years ago, and moved from Meyers' apartment into its first office in Queens, N.Y., in 1984, which it quickly outgrew.

Meyers, 49, moved the business to Wilmington in 1995 to be closer to the now nearly shuttered textile industry. The company now has its clothing made to order, mostly in India and Pakistan.

"We have a full art department that can create the designs from scratch," said Meyers, who founded the company while attending Columbia University in New York, where he earned his MBA.

In one area of the warehouse, boxes of clothing to be embroidered fill racks. Elsewhere, there are rows of desks. Graphic designers like Kit Furderer, 27, who has a bachelor's degree in fine arts, used his computer recently to fine-tune an existing lion logo for a customer.

"I think the challenge is to understand exactly what the customer is looking for," Furderer said, explaining that after telephone consultations customers can choose one of three versions of a design.

Operators man 18 embroidery machines that can simultaneously produce six items apiece, and also three smaller machines.

Meyers said the company's ability to focus on small orders, a minimum of four items of clothing, also makes it possible to serve smaller-scale customers, like families and clubs.

Jarra Frost, 24, recently used the machine's computer to select the corresponding program for an order and then rethread the machine. "It can be complicated. It's very quality-oriented," he said. "I can do probably up to 120 shirts a day depending upon the size of the order."

See the full Star-News story.

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