The Deer’s Embroidery Legacy’s Story

Award Winning Embroidery – Since 1958

Award-Winning Embroidery
Since 1958

“Our mission is to advance the beautiful art of machine embroidery by providing top-quality products and proven education to embroiderers everywhere.”

Founded in the 1950s by John Deer’s grandparents, Embroidery Legacy started as a Schiffli loom factory producing lace for North America’s bridal industry. Over 40 years, we expanded to 2 large factories, operating 6 Schiffli Looms and 136 multi-head embroidery machines, employing 54 people, and becoming one of North America’s top embroidery manufacturers, producing over 10 million embroidered goods per year.

In the mid-1990s, as commercial embroidery moved overseas, we pivoted to a commercial digitizing production house, known as Punch Perfect, serving global corporations like Disney, Coca-Cola, the NFL, and ironically enough John Deere (the tractor company) with John Deer (our CEO) winning 30 awards for his work.

Adapting again in the mid-2000s, we shifted our focus towards home embroiderers as John Deer’s Adorable Ideas, creating nearly 30,000 quality designs and running numerous live embroidery events worldwide.

Today, as Embroidery Legacy, we honor our heritage by offering an extensive range of embroidery designs, software, online education, and live events. Our history reflects our commitment to excellence in embroidery.

Meet Our Family

65 Years Later We’re Still Proudly a Small Family Run Business

Winning 30 commercial digitizing awards, John Deer has been the most awarded embroidery digitizer in the world for over two decades now. As a 4th generation embroiderer, John has an incredibly unique history in the embroidery digitizing industry as he is the last remaining Schiffli Master Digitizer still alive and teaching in North America. John learned and apprenticed under Swiss Schiffli Master Digitizers (then known as “punchers”) over 30 years ago in his grandparents’ factory, before computers even entered the digitizing world.

John has run 2 commercial embroidery factories, owned one of the world’s largest production digitizing houses, wrote the book “Digitizing Made Easy” (which has sold over 51,000 copies), and coached 100,000+ home and commercial embroiderers globally.