About OML Patches

 

 

 A brief history of the beginnings of OML

We are a smaller family owned and operated company and have been in business for 10 years.   

Years ago, this all started out as a hobby, something to occupy some time and keep us busy as well as an embroidery learning experience.  A friend asked us to make a patch for him as he was going overseas in the military and wanted something funny that he was not able to find anywhere. So we put his favorite saying on the patch and gave it to him.  He loved it!  He asked that we make many more to take with him, and he passed them out overseas and started the field testing to make sure we were on the right track.  When he returned from Afghanistan he requested that we make him a handful more patches to take back with him, and that was the beginning of our love of patches.

This is how we realized our creativity and our love of patches and started the lengthy process of setting up and launching OMLPATCHES.COM.  From here we worked with some friends and family in the military and airsoft and paintball friends to fine tune our color and material selection to perfectly match the camouflage we were stitching on. Figuring out the correct thread colors for subdued camo pain staking trial and error process of stitching up a patch and sending it to airsoft friends,  and requesting their feedback many many times.  Needless to say, our friends had books and books of patches by the time we were finished.  After a bit of sweat and tears we finally got all the color to be subdued properly and to this day they are the best matched colors you will find on any patch produced. 

 With one 6 needle machine and a bunch of ideas it was now time to educate ourselves in the digitizing process.  We use two different pieces of software (Tajima DGML and Embird) to create the works of art that our customers come up with.  One program being the top-end high up on the embroidery pedestal and a slightly lower full service mid-level digitizing software.  Between us we enrolled in many courses to learn the art of digitizing.   Digitzing takes years to master, and digitizing for patches specifically takes a lot of knowledge, as there are no industry standards.

Very quickly we leared that there were two major complaints about other patches in general.  One major complaint that most people had was that the velcro eventually or very quickly came off of the patch, which rendered the patch useless or required fixing.  We addressed this issue head on, and came up with a process that guarantees that the velcro will never come off the patch.  The second complaint was the subdued colors...most companies do not know how to properly subdue colors - We have heard horror stories that a company ran out of OD green thread and decided to use lime green instead, and didn't really understand what the problem was.  Lime green is not a subdued color, to say the least.  We addressed this issue head on and made sure that each color that was subdued was correct, and made a base camo guide that is the basis of all our patch colors. The next big problem that the patch consumers mentioned was quality control.  When you order hundreds of patches from big companies, they may produce them quickly but they are usually full of errors and there is little quality control.  We are a smaller company and we provide a hands on patch production department.   Each patch is seen and checked by humans at various points in the production.  We take the time to take out jump stitches and make sure there are no errors in any of the designs that we do.  We do not have stock of any patches, each patch is made to order - nothing is mass produced.  Another quality control issue is the background fabrics - we started out using only the BEST material for our patches - an example is RIPSTOP and we will only buy our frabric from the actual producers so we make sure we have the real thing.

The patches were used in the field and tested for quality and durability over the years by all of our customers.  It started with a friend in the military and amazing airsoft friends, and has grown to include agents and officers in the FBI, CIA, Customs and Border Patrol as well as POLICE and SWAT teams all over the world.  During this time, we made many changes to our patch making process to ultimately produce the best quality and handcrafted patch that money can buy.

Over the years we have kept up with the various camos and backgrounds used by military and law enforcement and created an large variety of backgrounds to serve as the base for your patch design.  In doing this we have kept up with matching the proper thread colors so your patches look great.

Embroidery Machines at OML

We started off with a single needle embroidery machine.  That machine was fun, but certainly didn't produce many patches.  We moved up to a 6 needle brother machine and still needed more.  We bought a 15 needle Barudan workhorse and then a twin 6 needle machine, and finally a 12 needle Happy machine (yes, thats the name of the company).  We now have a total of 39 needles between 4 machines to quickly stitch out all of our patches.  All of our embroidery machines are industrial machines built strong and made to be workhorses.

 

There you have it! This is the brief background on OMLPATCHES.  We are a very dedicated bunch who all work long hours, seven days a week to produce high quality custom patches that you can proudly show off for years to come.  We call that "patch envy".

 Go on and create your masterpiece today or select one of our hundreds of stock designs and add your own customization the colors and backgrounds.  Truly custom patches at OML Patches, the place for custom patches.

OML

Patching the world one team at a time!