Interview with Eurika of Best Embroidery

Introduction
Best Embroidery is made up of a husband a wife team called Dirk and Eurika Bester. We reside in Margate, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South-Africa. Margate is on the beautiful south coast of South-Africa and we moved down here 5 years ago. It is absolutely fantastic to sit and digitize and when you look up to stretch your eyes you see the beautiful ocean and the green of the trees. It is almost sub-tropical in this area, so we don't know winter as such. We have been married for 20 years and decided to get re-married 5 years ago on the beach. We have 3 teen age daughters who are not interested in embroidery as a profession, but are always willing to help when mom gets ready to travel around the world.

How we got started
Dirk "was" a programmer and the moment he saw the first electronic embroidery machines, he fell in love and decided that it was a must have for his hobby crazy wife. He wanted the software as well, but I was not in the least interested because I did not like computers at all. He ended up buying the first Brother software in SA and we were out on our own because no one at Brother even knew how to install the program. If it was not for the original BBD list, I don't think we would be doing today what we love so much!! Eurika lost her work due to affirmative action and decided that her hobby will just have to become her full time job. A few years down the line Dirk joined and we changed the name from Eurika's Creations to Best Embroidery.

Has the business changed since the beginning?
Oh boy how it has changed!! It started off as a fund raiser for an almost deaf girl to get a cochlear implant and then to a small site selling designs and then to a full fledged business on the internet and also touring and teaching across the world. Last year Eurika decided that it is time for SA to have it's very first embroidery conference and just went ahead and organized it without any knowledge of what she was doing! It was a HUGE success, but there it became apparent that there is a big need for supplies in SA, so on Dec 15, 2004 we opened the Best Embroidery shop where we import and sell supplies for embroidery to the South-African market as well as doing corporate embroidery.

Future projects:
We still enjoy every second of what we doing and will keep up the good work for as long as there is a market out there for our designs. We just wish that there were more hours in every day to get all the designs out that we have on the back burner! Each and every design is painstakingly digitized and extensively tested before it will ever be available for purchase, so there are still many to come.

Personal information:
We believe that you must never stop dreaming - work hard to fulfill your dreams, but never stop dreaming!! So if you have a dream project, but still haven't found the designs to do it justice, get in touch with us and we can work on your dream together!