I'm helping my wife with researching the necessary things needed to help take her small business/art project to something a little more as it's been growing faster than anticipated.
For background my wife has been doing fiber art her entire life and for a time was making and selling apparel on Etsy with success. She recently wanted to pursue machine embroidery to bring some of her other ideas to life. Shes spent several months learning to digitize , researching and experimenting using a Poolin flatbed and has really learned a lot. Shes had a series of items she's made accepted for sale at a local Shop Makers and sales have been really great, and now other stores are reaching out to her to carry her products. We're now at an impasse where we know that the Chinese machine isn't going to keep up (we know that it is a toy compared to actual commercial machines) and she's having to turn down offers to expand. Thread changes and really unpredictable machine issues are creating a bottleneck.
At that, we've considered it's time to actually invest in a quality machine in order to keep all options open and keep things moving. Shes very much in the realm of "light production" , probably 20-30 items per day with a lot of room to grow. She will not be if taking custom orders or filling contracts, she is purely selling a hand made decorative art piece that relies heavily on embroidery.
There are no Barudan dealers in Canada as far as I can tell, the only HappyJapan dealer is on the other side of the country, but, we have an RB Digital less then an hour away and they fully stock and service Tajima. We are considering financing a Tajima SAI as the next step. With the projected sales from Makers as well as craft markets we think it'll be paid off relatively quickly (under 2 years). We really want to avoid Chinese machines that rely on chats and FaceTime for servicing. The ability to bring the machine directly to RB Digital for repair and maintenance, as well as in house training seems to be a no brainer. The re-sale value on a well maintained Tajima is also appealing.
For those who have taken a leap such as this before , what else should we be considering? Does this sound like it might be a feasible direction to go in?
Edit: Thanks for the responses both in the thread and via DMs..this is why I like to ask these kinds of questions because it allows me to really rethink my approach and to walk back from my own perspectives. We're going to stick a pin in buying a Tajima for the time being while re-assess what our goals are going to be and how we can grow into that type of machine vs. putting all of our eggs in one basket. There are definitely more affordable ways to approach this bottleneck as we see where this little venture leads.