Last night didn’t start perfectly. My internet went down five minutes before we were supposed to go live, and I had to scramble to get a hotspot running. We opened six minutes late.
Sixty-six shops had registered and were waiting. Seventy-five percent stayed for the full 40 minutes.
I’ll take that.
What the data showed
The NNEP Pricing Diagnostic has been live for several months. It’s a 14-question assessment that scores a shop’s pricing approach across five drivers. Last night was the first time we presented the findings publicly.
The average score: 8.1 out of 20. Fifty-one percent of respondents scored in what I call the Blind Spots range — 0 to 7 out of 20. That’s not a comment on how hard someone is working. It means the pricing system they’re using has structural gaps. Pieces that are simply missing.
Forty-two percent scored in the Partial range. Seven percent scored Strong.
When I look at that distribution, what I see is an industry that has been handed incomplete tools for a long time — and has made them work as well as anyone could. The problem isn’t effort. It’s that quoting by stitch count was never designed to produce reliable profitability. The model we’ve all used for decades is incomplete.
The PRICE Framework
The briefing introduced the framework NNEP has been building to address this. Five drivers. Every order needs to account for all five before a quote goes out.
P — Production Cost: What does it actually cost to produce this order? Not a rough number — the real figure, including materials, machine time, and overhead.
R — Real Labor: Actual tracked time. Setup, production, handling, finishing. Not an estimate.
I — Intended Profit: Profit as a deliberate input to every quote, not whatever is left over.
C — Capacity Pressure: How does current demand and available production time affect what you should be charging?
E — End Customer Value: What is this order worth to this specific customer, in their current situation?
Don’t quote stitches. PRICE the order.
What the room was asking
The Q&A covered a lot of ground. A few things worth sharing.
On setup fees: one attendee — a shop that won’t even quote until they’ve seen the logo, know what it’s going on, how many items, and the turnaround time — noted they factor all of that into pricing from the start. That’s exactly right, and it’s rarer than it should be. Most shops we’re hearing from are not building that time into their pricing model.
On per-stitch industry benchmarks: someone asked whether we have data on what other shops charge per stitch, to understand if they’re competitive. My honest answer: that’s the wrong question. What the shop down the road charges is irrelevant. What matters is how much it costs you to create that order — and whether you’re charging more than it’s costing you. If you’re not, you’re losing money. Most businesses are finding out they’re losing it more often, and by more dollars, than they ever understood.
On competition: this came up in a way I want to share because I think it reframes something important. Your competition for a job is very rarely another embroidery shop. More often, it’s the tire that just blew, the disposal that went out, the sports fee for school that came due. Your customer isn’t comparing your quote to someone else’s — they’re deciding whether this order is where their money goes right now. That’s the real market pressure shops are navigating.
On overhead recovery: a contract embroidery shop asked specifically about factoring in overhead — utilities, mortgage, taxes. That level of detail will be covered in the third event, the Implementation Intensive, where I’ll work with a small group over three days to custom-build their exact pricing structure. We’re running that in August.
What comes next
Briefing 2 is coming in late June. It will cover all five PRICE drivers and walk through three different kinds of orders — fully pricing each one using the framework, so you can see exactly how the five elements apply to real work.
The State of Embroidery Pricing — NNEP’s first annual benchmark report — publishes June 21, 2026. That’s also NNEP’s 30th anniversary. If you haven’t contributed to the benchmark yet, there’s still time.
And the goal of all of it — the diagnostic, the briefings, the intensive, the report — is simple. A profitable embroidery business. Not just a busy one.
If you missed last night, the replay is available to registered attendees. If you haven’t taken the diagnostic, that’s where to start — five minutes, 14 questions, an immediate score out of 20.
All the best, Jennifer
Jennifer Cox, President & Co-Founder, NNEP