One important part of belonging to a motorcycle club is wearing your club's logo and colors. Many clubs have custom embroidered patches created for their members that feature the club name, its home city, and its logo, if it has one. The patch is usually done in whatever colors the club has decided are their official colors, too. While wearing these patches on your jacket or vest is sometimes optional, many clubs require members to wear them at official club events and on rides so that it's easy to identify the club members at a glance.
Some clubs give other patches to their club officers and representatives. These patches have the name of the office or title on them, and again, their main function is to make it easy to tell who is in charge. However, once you've stepped down as an officer, you usually have to remove these patches. For that reason, many people sew these officer patches on instead of ironed them on. You can remove sewn on patches if you carefully cut away the threads, but it is impossible to remove patches that have been ironed on because the plastic backing has melted onto the material.
It's also good to note that because they're usually custom embroidered, you may not be able to iron on your club patches. It all depends on where you get them from and if that company has the equipment to add the plastic iron on backing after the patch is embroidered. Some smaller companies only have the embroidery machine. If you create your own patches, it's much the same, there's no plastic backing on blank patches because it would be too difficult to push the embroidery needle through it.
