The single most important reason to go with 15 colors is thus - by having all of your common colors already on the machine you don't have as much down time tying on different colors. Tying on thread is a major time waster and if you think it is bad on a single head, wait until you're tying on thread on a large machine.

If you are doing mostly personalization, your designs will be one or two colors and even with stock designs thrown in, it is pretty rare that you need more than 6 or 8 but you don't want to spend your time tying on thread before each job.

15 needles will cover the basic colors like white, black, red, the local school colors, etc., and leave you about 5 needles for colors that vary from time to time.

We also leave one needle setup all the time for metallic thread and another setup for 60 weight thread with a smaller needle for tiny lettering.

We even go as far as to batch different jobs with the same colros so we can minimize the down time from tying on thread. Once in a while on our eight head machines we even assign a second person to tie on the thread for the next job while one is running.

Years ago we had single needle machines with no trimmers. The operator spent their day trimming and tying. Technology is wonderful.