What does a live embroidery event cost?

A staffed local station starts around $5,000, plus crew time at $250 per hour counted from load-in to teardown, blanks at catalog cost, and a flat $900 travel fee outside Orange County, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

What is included in the $5,000 station base?

Commercial embroidery equipment, the thread library, artwork digitizing and pre-event sampling, transport of gear, and a production lead who designs the menu and runs the station flow.

Do setup and teardown hours count as crew time?

Yes. Crew time is billed at $250 per hour per person from load-in to load-out, so a 4-hour event window typically bills 6 to 7 crew hours once setup and teardown are counted.

Pricing

Live embroidery event cost, line by line

No gated PDF, no “request pricing” maze. This is how the number is built, with the same anchors we use in real quotes.

The anchors

Station base — commercial machine or patch press, thread library, digitizing and sampling of your artwork, gear transport, and a production leadfrom $5,000

Crew — each operator or line host, per hour, counted from load-in through teardown, never just the open hours$250 / hr

Blanks — Richardson 112 and Flexfit caps, canvas totes, robes, Bella+Canvas 3001 tees; quoted at current catalog cost, no mystery markup buried in the baseper item

Travel — flat, outside Orange County / Los Angeles / San Diego (this is the Las Vegas line)$900

A worked example

Say you are opening a store in Costa Mesa with a monogram bar, four open hours on a Saturday.

Station base$5,000

Crew: 1 operator × 7 hrs (2 setup + 4 open + 1 down)$1,750

Travel (Orange County)$0

Working total before blanks$6,750

Add totes at catalog cost for your expected headcount and the quote is done. Nothing else appears later.

What moves the number

Stitch count. A 3-minute monogram and a 20-minute jacket back are different products. Denser art means fewer finished pieces per hour, which can mean a second head.
Crowd size vs. open hours. Throughput is physics. 200 guests through a single-head monogram bar in 3 hours does not work; a patch bar or added head does. See pieces per hour.
Blank choice. A structured cap costs more than a canvas tote; a robe more than a pouch. Blank selection is the biggest swing after the base.
Distance. Local SoCal skips travel entirely; Vegas adds the flat $900; other states get quoted by city and freight.
Companion stations. Pairing a DTF press alongside adds crew hours but covers guests who want full-color print instead of stitch.

Price my event

Send the basics and we will return an itemized quote using exactly the lines above.