Natalie Sullivan goes through between 200,000 to 500,000 meters of thread annually - that’s 124 to 310 miles - embroidering everything from horse blankets to underwear.
Sullivan, 39, is the owner of Wild Oats Embroidery, which she started in her garage on Bridgeport Road in January 2007. She’s the only employee.
“It’s just been me,” she said. “My husband Brian was deployed in Kuwait in 2006, and we decided that I should stay home with our newborn baby. I had to do something while I was here, so I started this.”
The process is mostly automated. Sullivan has two embroidery machines in her garage, one with four heads, the other with one.
Each head has 15 needles with different colors. Designs are uploaded on a floppy disk, a flash card or a direct cable. After mapping the image, Sullivan programs the colors by their corresponding needle.
“I just need to make sure the right color is on the right needle,” she said. “I’ve been known to have the wrong color on the right needle.”
The machines don’t come cheap. Her four-head machine cost $40,000 brand new and her one-head is $7,500 used. After she gets the four-head machine paid off in a year, Sullivan will add a second to her assembly line.
Sullivan learned embroidery in Elizabethtown in 1994 and had friends who were interested in the potential business.
“They said, ‘You know how to do this, if you get a machine, we’ll send you some work,’ so I called my husband later and told him about this opportunity,” Sullivan said. “He wanted us to think on it for a while and then make a decision.”
Two nights after the phone call, a friend told Sullivan that she would send work her way.
“I called my husband that night and told him, ‘I can’t wait. I have to make a decision now.’ Ever since then business has been growing.”
Now that her husband is retired from the military and the Commonwealth Office of Technology, he’ll soon be trained to help her with her large contract jobs, which take from January until April to complete.
“I’m just happy he’s a quick study,” she said. “The hard part is just getting him in the garage and training him.”
Sullivan’s clientele includes contracted work with state agencies and a growing number of local customers as word spreads. She’s embroidered not only locally, but for customers in Lawrenceburg, Lexington and Shelbyville as well.
Sullivan will embroider practically anything that can hold a stitch. She has embroidered shirts, hats, visors and horse blankets. Her oddest request was from a woman who wanted her monogram on a pair of her underwear.
Her only requirement was that the tags had to still be on them.
“I had to know they were clean,” she said.
Sullivan offers personal pricing and guarantees to beat any comparative price in town. If the customer provides the blank material, she’ll have it completed in one week at the latest.
Oddly enough, Sullivan has never advertised, using only word-of-mouth to generate business. So far, that’s been enough to keep her content.
“I never thought I could do something that I enjoy and make more money working at home than I would at a normal desk job,” she said.
Wild Oats Embroidery
e-mail: wildoatsembroidery@fewpb.net