How to Create Beautiful Embroidered Patches

I grew up collecting patches at national parks, on road trips with my family, and even on my martial arts uniform. I love how they feel like a little emblem of fun and accomplishment. So, when I started my own online art school, I knew I wanted patches to be part of my student experience.

The hard part was, there was very little info out there about how to take a design I loved, send it to a company, and get a good result. Over the last five years of experimenting and trying out different suppliers I finally have the process down, and wanted to share how I work to help other artists with the process!

I’ll start with some tips for design and production, then share a summary of my experience with various patch companies, my design process, and then the rest of the article will focus on how I maximize the ordering expereince with Custom Patch Factory to get a great result.

General tips to make the process easier and patches look great:

• Ask them to send you photos of the thread color sheets. For patches, this will usually be the 100% polyester thread, and a more limited color selection than what they use for woven patches (which have thousands of colors). More than anything else, this helped me be able to color match my designs.

• Use the maximum number of colors allowed for free. More colors means a more intricate and interesting design. This is usually 8-9 colors, with a fee for more than that.

• Have detail in the design but don’t go overboard.

• Always zoom out on your design to look at it small- most patches are 3.5 inches or less!

• Use color contrast or light/dark contrast to make the design shine.

• The “digital proof” doesn’t mean much – always pay the extra fee if needed to see a physical proof! I found that the digital and physical one often look nothing alike.

• Watch out for companies that simplify or alter your design at the digital proof stage. This is common, and I always check this and insist they display my actual design on all project documents

• Pay the extra for 100% embroidery, it is worth it

Patch Companies I’ve worked with and my thoughts on them:

First a quick note – since I started making patches five years ago the prices have gone up a TON for many companies. As much as I wish I could use a US production facility, and I reached out to 7 US companies, I simply can’t afford the 2-5x extra cost, since I give my patches to my students for free. Also, five years ago companies seemed to be much closer in cost, and now there is a huge spread.

The/Studio: I used this company a few times starting in 2024. Super crisp lines and the thickest embroidery, and big tightly woven merrowed edges. I only ever ordered when they had a 40-50% off sale happening, otherwise they are way too pricy. The sale got my price for a large order (I think 700)  down to about $1 per patch. Downsides: super slow production process, slow to reply to proof feedback/change requests, and they cold email and call me a ton. Prior order also had a major quality issue (very visible defective thread pattern in the sky), so they had to remake 260 for me. They are very reticent to make detailed designs, and I had to edit one design five times to get it to where they said it was sew-able.

Custom Patches.net: I used them once, and they were great to work with. Kept a lot of detail in the design, and were very understanding about my desire to get colors accurate to my design. The dark blue thread did fade a lot when on a backpack for 2 years, but they said that was the first time they’d heard that feedback. Zero quality issues, everything was perfect.

Custom Patch Factory: First company I worked with, and patches turned out well, but did have some minor quality issues (you must report these within ten days of receipt to get a refund or store credit). Thread colors and shape held up amazingly well on a fanny pack I used for three years of hiking. I stopped using them because of the QC issue and how hard it was to get my colors right (this was before I learned to see photos of the thread sheets). Switched back to them this year (spring 2026) for four new designs because they simply have the best price, especially with the frequent sales. Newest order looks great, with excellent detail!

• Downsides: Must inspect each order, there is always some small issue on a handful, but they do refund promptly. They are terrible at reading production notes / change requests and following directions, which I am willing to deal with for the lower cost. More on how I work with this challenge below.

How I approach the design process

First, figure out what shape you want. Circles have less space than rectangle or squares, etc! And, decide on where the text should go, as this also eats up space.

Personally, I like to start with a design as a physical drawing. I sketch a bunch of concepts in pencil, and then turn the best ones into simplified black and white linework, and then finalize the best of those. Then, I make the lines digital using a scanner and the vectorize tools in Adobe Illustrator.

Once I have the digitized linework, I go into photoshop and really dive into the design. Often, I end up digitally painting over all the lines with the various colors unless I want the outlines in the final patch. This process takes me a long time, because I’m by trade a watercolor painter and working in solid colors is harder for me! I use a Wacom tablet to do the digital drawing, which took a while to get good and fast at.

If I did many more designs like this each year I would invest in a fancy ipad with procreate and the apple pencil, but for the handful I do each year, the tablet works great once I got good at it.

I always put each color on it’s own layer, which adds a wee bit of time initially but I promise it’s worth it once you have to edit it. And, then it’s ready should you ever need the colors on separate layers for something like a screen printing process etc.

For digital design I don't think the resolution needs to be crazy high because the patch makers seem to only need a JPG, PNG, or flattened PSD. Usually I work at 600 dpi and around 10x10 inches which is big but that way I can zoom and nothing is fuzzy which I find annoying to look, and my PC can handle big files with many layers.

Save often and save many versions. Whenever I start to make big changes I start a new file, so I can go back to a prior one as needed.

Lastly, I use the thread color sheet provided by the company to make a color guide that I submit with the design. The image below shows a section of these thread color sheets that I've been sent in the past.

Process I use for working with Custom Patch Factory

After making four patches with this company in the span of a few weeks, I now have the process and communication strategies down. Link to the options/ordering page: https://www.custompatchfactory.com/product/patches/custom/custom-embroidered-patches

First, you’ll place your order. I use the following options which are quite standard:

-          Style- embroidered patches

-          Iron on backing

-          Shape- I usually go for circle or rectangle/ square

-          100% embroidery (worth the extra cost)

-          Standard thread

-          Merrowed edge

-          Standard twill backing

-          Step 8- add exact size and upload files

Once you get to the next steps, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the folks working on your design have a ton on their plate, and I suspect language might be a bit of a barrier, too (almost all production facilities are in China or other regions of Asia). So, I am kind and appreciative in my communications, and try to be very clear.

Digital proof stage: once the order is submitted you’ll get a digital proof. To be honest, you can pretty much ignore this except to watch for major errors or alterations to your design.

• I make sure the file they send has my EXACT digital design displayed on it – they will almost always change it to a simplified version, tell them to change it back in the feedback request.

• I also make sure my color guide is shown in the color area, and I tell them to remove the PMS color codes. Otherwise the production team looks at these codes and not my selected threads.

• I think they sometimes don’t read my notes, so if you have to request stuff multiples times, or request one big thing at a time.

• You can pretty much ignore the digital proof, other than looking for an obvious oddity or error, since in my experience the production team will look at your design not the auto-generated digital proof. Other companies in the past used the digital proof more, but for this company it’s basically useless.

Photo proof: this is where things get interesting.

• Look for any big mistakes (like keeping a digital proof error that you fixed and they still use, that’s happened a few times).

• I find that the quality of the photo proof is a bit lower than the actual ones, in terms of design accuracy, so a little bit of wonky edges or something here I don’t worry about.

• Check colors!! It will always look a little washed out in my experience, but I can get a good idea of the colors and can tell if they used my selections or not.

• If they ignored my color selections or used a bad version of the digital proof instead of my design (this happened recently) I kindly let them know what happened, and ask them to make the proof again, uploading my file directly to them again.

• It can also help to show the requested changes directly on a photo, with a line and text added, as this makes it very clear.

• Some companies will not redo a physical proof without an extra fee, but I found Custom Patch Factory to be very understanding this time, and they are not charging extra when they had to redo a proof due to a big error like those listed above.

I approve the proof, and it goes into production!! Custom patch Factory has by far the fastest production times, and excellent shipping, too! It looks like 4 days from China to my home in the Northwest.

I hope this blog post might help folks! Let me know in the comments if you have other questions!!