Austin Embroidery Co - The Beginning
David Quinn & Morgan Lewis
David Quinn started Austin Embroidery Co. in 2021. David had a background running his own clothing brand in Chicago Illinois from 2015-2020. Right before the pandemic hit David had gotten his brand into clothing boutiques in the Midwest as well as urban outfitters due to the pandemic, urban outfitters had to cancel the buy, therefore leading him to move to Austin. While in Austin David was creative consulting for corporations and brands that needed help with merchandise. David had a manual for color. With a screen Printing press in his apartment, he still had to outsource Embroidery after a bad experience with a local shop missed printing 585 out of 600 hats on a $15,000 order. After that, David decided to take matters into his own hands and buy his own first commercial machine.
David put that two head commercial embroidery machine that weighed 850 pounds and was about 6 feet wide inside his 750 ft.² one bedroom apartment David ran the business by himself for 4 to 5 months before hiring help. David reached out on Instagram story and put a message out seeking help a friend from Ohio reached out and said that he had a friend that would be interested in a good fit that person was Morgan Lewis our now general manager
At the beginning, David only had 15 to 20 hours a week for Morgan due to financial income however had a plan to rent Morgan up to full-time. We then operated he and I for a year out of a South austin two bedroom apartment where we had the Screen Printing in the guest bedroom and the Embroidery machine and the dining area. We would have customers pull up to the house and it would be somewhat embarrassing, but also people also respected it. There will be times where people would ask to tour the shop and David would have to lie and say the shop was under construction and then meet them at a coffee shop with the samples to display the work, but the work spoke for itself and we ended up landing pretty large clients out of a two bedroom apartment once that lease was ending we decided to take on our first commercial lease. We stumbled upon a friends warehouse that was a commercial tire shop. They had two warehouses and weren’t using one of the warehouses to his full capacity so we sublease half of the warehouse plus the front office. This was a great way to ease our way into having commercial rent only leasing half the space and saving on rent at the beginning.
Six months later, we outgrew a 2000 ft.² and needed to move to the 4000 ft.² which is the total square footage of the warehouse. We stayed on a sublease for a few months and then entered our own lease in the same warehouse. We also built rooms and out of the shop to be perfect for a print and embroidery shop one by one and new hire by new hire. We slowly grew and now we have a team of 8 to 9 people that are working full-time.
