Self-Taught and Self-Made

Aug 1, 2008

Darla Hall's designs center on her two greatest passions: water and boats. Her home-based company, Stitches by SWYCE, serves clients ranging from a boat owner buying jackets for his crew to a weekend boater and his family.

After about a decade as an award-winning embroidery machine operator, Darla Hall wanted a new challenge. Working at a company called Canyon Gear, she approached her boss about learning to digitize. He agreed, with the stipulation that she had to teach herself. "His wife turned on the computer and said, 'See you tomorrow,'" Hall recalls.

After her bosses decided to move to Florida in 2001, Hall was left with a week of severance pay and the prospect of applying for jobs for which she was overqualified. So she took her $487 severance check and a portfolio of her work and headed to the Imprinted Sportswear Show in Orlando, Fla., bent on making her way.

Enter Stitches by SWYCE, the name of her company that includes a slight variation of a nickname her husband gave her.

Hall's Brick, N.J.-based company, located in her home, focuses on her two greatest passions: water and boats. Stitches by SWYCE creates designs for clients ranging from a boat owner buying jackets for his crew to a weekend boater and his family.

"If [a customer] can afford a yacht, he or she can afford a jacket," Hall muses.

One of her greatest joys is that she can do what she loves from home and still be there for her 5-year-old daughter, Amanda. The other joy is the look on a customer's face when she delivers a design that hits the mark. Hall's home-based shop includes two 15-color embroidery machines — a Tajima singlehead and an SWF 4-head. Her designs are digitized using Pulse software.

When Amanda hits first grade, Hall will expand her home operation into a more spacious production facility.

"This is what I have always really wanted," she says. "And while I'm most comfortable being an artist and running that machine, I understand that paperwork, phone calls and e-mails are all part of the deal." — Michael Pallerino

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