After receiving designs from over 35 Students from Leeds Collage of Art it made choosing three to manufacture an impossible task.  Specialised have been over whelmed with the response, creativity and quality from all the students.  Choosing only three covers led to many debates as we argued for our favorites.  We spread all the designs out in the offices and let all the staff have a look a the concepts to gain a wide range of feedback.

We considered many aspects including market interest, demand,implementation, cost, wow factor, what cars they would be shown on and of course the ones we just loved.

We have made our decision and will be announcing tomorrow the winners.  However all the covers will feature on our new website which will be live in the next 8 weeks.  So please keep visiting the site for updates.

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We’ve re-launched our car cover product line! Why? Well, because our customers asked us to. Your feedback told us that our product names were a little confusing and frankly, we agreed; so we put the kettle on.

After much deliberation, wielding of chewed Biros and coffee rings on enough paperwork to start our own line of interior design wallpaper; we came up with Stormshield and Prestige.

Nothing revolutionary, both of those products already existed, but now we’ve simplified it.

Stormshield will handle anything and everything outdoor: if the wind and rain is battering against your car, if you don’t have a garage or if your car looks like the bottom of a bird cage, you need a Stormshield car cover. This cover, previously known as Tempest, is our long-term outdoor storage cover.

When it comes to indoor storage, Prestige remains the undisputed champion of tailored, indoor car covers. This exquisite fabric offers an unrivalled fit and with an array of colour options, piping and custom artwork available, you can personalise your cover to create a truly unique design.

Stormshield Lite and Prestige Lite are more affordable, lightweight covers. The fabrics imitate many of the characteristics of their sister fabrics and although performance is reduced, their tailored fit makes them fantastic value and a much better investment than a semi-fit, bag in a box.

Here at Specialised Covers we offer you the opportunity of being able to customize your Prestige indoor car or motorbike cover. We have options for choosing the colours of the covers’ panels, for choosing the thread used for stitching, the finish of the fabric – either Matt or Metallic, as well as the choice of having your own graphics either printed or embroided on the cover, making a cover truly unique to you. In this article we will give a little more insight into the Embroidery we do at Specialised Covers and also talk briefly about the process and its limitations.

Embroidery in itself is an art. With the right machinery and professionally trained, experienced technicians this ‘art’ can be produced time and time again in high volumes and to a fine degree of accuracy. Before even a single stitch can be sewn the logo has to be converted from an image into a digital file format for the sewing machine to regonise – this process is called ‘Digitising’. Our most popular logos to date are the full colour ‘Shields’ of Ferrari and Porsche, however we also have on our database the files for other leading manufacturers such as:

Audi

BMW

Corvette

Jaguar (Leaping Cat - 2009 upwards)

Jaguar (Face - 2009 upwards)

Lotus

Mercedes

Rolls Royce (2009 & under)

TVR

See examples HERE. (Click on the image to Zoom in).

If you are interested in having an embroided logo sewn into your Prestige cover and the make of your car isn’t on our system, please call our Sales Team on 01943 864 646 to discuss whether embroidery is viable.

The positioning is typically placed up onto the bonnet of the car about 4 inches from the tip where the actual car logo is usually found. An embroidered logo can be a very time consuming task often limiting the size of how large we can actually go to. A full colour shield averages at 15cm in height and will take about an hour to complete with an average of 40-50,000 stitches. Logos with a smaller amount of detail and shading, such as the Audi ‘Rings’ and the Mercedes ‘Star’, we can stretch to an average sizing of 20-25cm without compromising the quality or appearance of the emblem.

With the centre panel of a car cover being so large, fitting the material onto the embroidery machine is difficult. To overcome this issue the design is rotated 180 degrees and stitched upside down before the whole cover is sewn together.

Most logos are constructed using a type of stitch known as a ‘Step and Satin’. The Step acts as a fill stitch and is used to shade in large areas. The Satin stitch is used for text, borders and shapes usually at a width of 8mm and under, anything larger is too widespread for the stitch to cover without ‘buckling’ occurring, an adverse effect we work extremely hard to eliminate.

Although we are able to embroider onto our Prestige indoor car and motorbike covers, unfortunately this option is unavailable for any outdoor covers; the simple reason being that each time the needle of the embroidery machine penetrates the outdoor fabric it punctures the waterproof membrane which compromises the waterproof protection of the cover and would cause leakage.

Read more about Prestige car covers HERE. For Prestige motorbike covers, HERE.