Ann The Gran Community

 As far as the freebees here and on a few other "embroidery sites" that do not offer formats, how does one Know they want to "belong to a club" if the designs aren't availabe to try. Some freebies aren't even good . I think that if you want a good customer base ever improving, with a good reputaion for service, one would need to provide each prospective "NEW" customer with their format. Do you believe that new to embroidery sewist can afford another expence?? Really, this is the most expensive hobby I have ever had. i can not buy every software that comes along just to convert a freebie design to try the sew out.

Money is hard enough to get to just waste it on products that wont help what each persons needs are.

Sorry I got on a soap box here, but it is true, I need to try out software and designs. Just so many sites to buy and some , even free, aren't worth the time to download and unzip.

So what to do about that "Free Trial"?

carylanne Janome 10001

Hi, Carylanne,

We like venting - it's good for business. I do agree with you that it needs to be as easy as possible for new embroiderers to get their hands dirty with the new hobby before going out and making discretionary purchases. Here's what we have done to facilitate that.

All of the over 6000 free designs available on AnnTheGran.com were contributed to us by digitizers all over the world in the early days of the Internet. At that time, almost all of them had PE-Design (by Brother) and so all of them were contributed to us in PES format. In the early days, practically everyone in Ann's network was a Brother user.

Well, word started to get around, and we started getting users from lots of other machine formats, and they of course starting asking for the designs in their format. Converting all the designs over to all formats and testing the quality of each one would have been an extremely complicated and expensive process, so two pieces of conversion software were developed, Pulse Ambassador (free) and Catalog Xpress (not free, but with extra functionality). Using either of these pieces of software, a non-PES user could then convert and use the designs.

All this information is on our site, and it would be easy for me to assume you should have found it, but it has occurred to me while reading your comments and writing this reply that it might be difficult for a new user on our site to understand all this or easily find it out, so what I'm going to do is post a message on the free designs page that briefly explains this and provides some links. It will take me a week or so, as that is a complicated page to modify, but I think that will help new users understand quickly and easily that new users can indeed experiment with their new hobby before making further investments.

Hope this helps.

BB