Image to Embroidery

Turning a photograph into something a needle can actually stitch is less a design problem than a graph theory one.

The Brief

An apparel business wanted customers to be able to request any image embroidered onto clothing — which meant automatically converting ordinary photographs into DST files, the stitch-instruction format used by Tajima industrial embroidery machines.

The Challenge

The core engineering problem was converting continuous pixel data into a sequence of discrete stitches while keeping total stitch count and thread jumps as low as possible, since both directly drive production cost and durability.

The Build

A small three-person team spanning Bangladesh and Ukraine designed several bespoke algorithms grounded in graph theory to plan efficient stitch paths and minimize wasted movement — feeding automatically generated files into a manufacturing partnership with Kornit Digital for production and fulfillment.

• Custom graph-theory-based stitch-path algorithms
• Automated photo-to-DST file conversion
• Manufacturing pipeline integration with Kornit Digital

The Outcome

A working pipeline that powered a real apparel business, turning ordinary customer photos into embroidered products.