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History
The history of Brother began in 1908 in Japan as the Yasui Sewing and Co. in Nagoya. The company was then inherited by Masayoshi Yasui, which changed its name to the Yasui Brothers’ Sewing Machine Co. Since its inception, Brother was to the forefront of the Sewing Machine innovation. In 1991, they launched their first sewing machines with computer-controlled embroidery mechanism, the PC-7000. The PC-7000 was the first machine to support the Brother Embroidery Designs Cards.
Release
Now, the exact release date is not known at the moment as most machines supporting the Brother Embroidery Designs Cards are post-2000 machine. The earliest dated picture of a machine supporting those cards are from a PE-150 in 1999. This being said, Brother stated the PE-Design module which allowed to put your own embroidery on a card was released in 1996, so it makes sense that the cards themselves were available before that. What we know for sure is that the Super Mario Embroidery World ( スーパーマリオ エンブロイダリーワー
ルド) was released in Japan first. It features 46 designs form Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart and Super Mario All-Stars, which put the released after July 14, 1993.
The U.S. release, simply titled No.17 features 52 designs, adding 6 design from Donkey Kong Country, which leads us to believe that the U.S. version was released after November 21, 1994, the release date for Donkey Kong Country. This being said, the embroidery logo on the cart (item #52) is the Super Donkey Kong logo, which is the Japanese name for Donkey Kong Country. So it is possible that it was developed before the U.S. name was decided, which could place the release before this date.
Demise
Since the personal embroidery machine was new and expensive, not many of these cards were produced. By the time these machine became affordable, Brother had lost the license to produce the Nintendo embroidery card. While this is the first time Nintendo partnered with a Sewing company, this would not be the last as Jaguar would launch in May 2000 the Jn-100, a Sewing Machine that connects to a Game Boy for its design followed by the JN-2000, which would add embroidery capabilities to the machine.