How to Design & Create Custom Baseball Hats
Let’s Talk Baseball Hats:
Whether you’re a major fan or you’ve never been on a baseball diamond in your life, one thing’s for sure: baseball hats will never go out of style. Sure, they rose in popularity due to their association with the great American sport, but they have a place far beyond the outfield and the bleachers.
Baseball hats are popular among students, adults, and children alike, whether worn during games or strictly for fashion purposes to complete an outfit or hide an uncooperative hairdo. Baseball caps are famously easy to throw on, but as it turns out, they’re also really easy to make thanks to excellent custom product manufacturing platforms.
Maybe you’re interested in creating baseball hats for a little league baseball team uniform, or to sell during community ball games to raise money. Or maybe you’re thinking of taking your custom baseball hats outside the field and inside the office, creating custom baseball hats for employee uniforms or to hand out as a company-wide gift to employees. Or maybe still you’re planning on creating merchandise for your personal brand, a limited-edition line of custom baseball caps your fans can wear to feel like they’re a part of your community.
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Time to Bring Your Vision to Life
Whatever your reason, it’s possible to bring your vision to life by creating custom baseball hats online. Here at THE/STUDIO, you can customize endless aspects of your baseball hats for a personalized look, from fabric, materials, cap closures, designs, embroidery, and other things you may never have even thought of, like profile height or the number of panels.
Whether you’re a larger business looking to expand your product selection or a small-scale creator who’s putting out a small collection of merchandise for the very first time, THE/STUDIO offers loads of flexibility, from the designs you can create to the number of pieces you can order. (That’s right, you could order as few or as many custom baseball hats as you’d like!)
Before you dive right into creating your custom baseball cap, learn a little more about whether you ought to sell custom baseball hats in your store and what you should keep in mind as you design them.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- What is the history of baseball hats?
- What makes a baseball hat a baseball hat?
- Should I create custom baseball hats?
- Creating baseball hats to sell
- Creating baseball hats for teams
- How to create a custom baseball hat online
Let’s get started!
History of Baseball Hats
Baseball hats were originally invented for – surprise! – baseball players. But their history is actually longer and more varied than you might expect!
Back in the late 19th century, baseball players were already wearing hats – but not the type you’d think. Players at popular baseball clubs often wore straw hats or pillbox-style hats to keep their faces out of the sun. It wasn’t until around the 1890s that hats we’d now recognize as an early version of the classic baseball cap first came on the scene, then started to evolve into the hats we know and love today. Over time, air holes were added, logos started appearing on the front of baseball caps, longer and firmer caps were introduced, etc. By the 1950s, baseball caps looked about the same as they do now, though materials and logos have changed.
But though the appearance of baseball caps hasn’t changed much since the 50s, how baseball caps are worn and viewed in society certainly has. Over the past few decades, companies have started using baseball caps to advertise, and fashion magazines have popularized the casual wear of baseball bats for women as well as men. By the mid-1970s, baseball caps were everywhere!
Today, baseball hats are still mainstream both on the baseball field and in fashion, making them a very popular custom product to create and sell. Over 300 million baseball caps are sold each year worldwide, and over 40 million baseball caps are sold every year in the U.S. alone. Baseball hats account for over 80% of all hat styles in the United States. You could practically call them the great American hat!
What makes a baseball hat a baseball hat?
While baseball hats are inextricably connected with the great American sport, not all baseball hats feature baseball logos – and not all hats that feature baseball logos are classic baseball hats, either. What’s more, many baseball hats are never even worn near a baseball game at all!
So what exactly makes a baseball hat a baseball hat? It’s all about the construction. They typically feature a classic medium profile and a curved bill, often with an embroidered logo in the front and either a buckle or snapback closure. They are typically made with a cotton or polyester blend, but can be made with many different materials.
Of course, other types of hats are very similar in look and style to baseball hats. Here at THE/STUDIO, creators can also make snapback hats, trucker hats, five-panel hats, fitted hats, and dad hats. While all of these hat styles essentially evolved out of the classic baseball hat silhouette, they have a few subtle differences that set them apart from one another.
Snapback hats are named after their ubiquitous plastic snap closure. They typically have a structured front and a flat, extra-long bill. They’re casual hats that aren’t typically worn while playing sports but are nonetheless popular as sports merchandise or fashion hats.
Trucker hats are known for their ultra-comfortable foam padding, chunky style, and mesh backing. They’re certainly not just for truckers – they’re a popular option for sports designs and fashion print designs, especially during the summer season.
Five-panel hats are named after their traditional panel construction. Many traditional baseball hats are also five-panel hats, but not all five-panel hats are baseball hats. Five-panel hats typically have a high profile and a profile shape, though technically any hat with five panels is a five-panel hat!
Dad hats are trendy among people of all ages and genders – not just dads! Dad hats usually feature an unstructured body, a metal buckle, and a curved bill, often with minimal embroidery in the front of the hat.
If you’re planning on creating hats for fans or members of a baseball team, you don’t necessarily have to limit yourself to the classic silhouette of a baseball cap. You could always add your baseball team logo to a different style of brimmed hat, or even to a knit beanie to keep fans warm in the stands during uncharacteristically cold or windy games. These hats just won’t be baseball caps in the most traditional sense!
Should I create custom baseball hats?
Creating custom baseball hats has the potential to yield great margins and drive major profit in your store, but it’s not necessarily the best product for every business. But here are a few of the main pros of custom baseball hats:
- Low cost – Custom baseball hats start at an affordable price of $3.63 each, depending on how many you order and the add-ons you select. Considering how baseball hats sell for anywhere from $10-30, they’re a high-profit product!
- Crowd-pleaser – Custom baseball hats aren’t just for baseball teams and fans! They’re popular among many consumers.
- Custom – You can personalize the material, shape, paneling, bill, closure, and more on your custom baseball hat for a result that’s 100% unique.
- Easy to make – You can partner with top factories to create custom baseball caps using THE/STUDIO’s product creation tool. (Plus, our 100% satisfaction guarantee ensures you’ll end up with a product both you and your customers are thrilled about!)
While custom baseball hats are a very popular product overall, the decision of whether you should create them for your customers depends on your budget, your audience, your brand, and the other products you currently sell. Here are a few questions to consider before you make the decision:
- Who are you creating these hats for? – Whether you’re giving these hats to your employees, selling them to sports fans, or distributing them as part of a baseball team uniform, you’ll want to make sure you’re really clear on who will actually wear them. Consider when they’ll wear them and how much they’d be willing to purchase them for. And on that note, make sure your customers would actually be interested in wearing baseball hats at all or if they’d prefer another type of custom product! (Thinking of creating custom hats for teams? Click here to learn more about what ought to go into that decision!)
- What other products do you sell? – How would custom baseball hats fit in with the rest of your product line? Would baseball hats fit right in with what your customers already know about your brand, or would introducing them to your shop seem like it came right out of left field? (If you’re planning on giving your custom baseball hats away to employees or team members instead, consider other gifts you’ve given away in the past and other parts of their uniform.)
- How many are you planning on ordering? – Many product manufacturers set a minimum order quantity creators must meet for custom orders. THE/STUDIO doesn’t have any minimum order requirements, but you’ll pay less per item for larger orders. Consider budget and order size in mind before you start designing your hats.
Not sure whether baseball hats are the best fit for your needs? Why not look into other custom product options? With THE/STUDIO, you can create custom patches, custom pins, custom socks, custom beanies, custom stickers, custom keychains, and more online. You can also create other types of custom hats such as dad hats, beanies, or trucker hats.
How to Make Custom Baseball Hats Online
You don’t have to be a master hat-maker to create high-quality custom baseball hats. In fact, you don’t even have to be a sports fan or a designer! As long as you have a computer and an internet connection, you can create a custom baseball hat online and still customize every last inch of it, from the structure of the hat itself to the embroidered design. Here’s how you can create custom baseball hats online.
1. Find a manufacturer
First things first, you need to find a reputable manufacturer to partner with. After all, the manufacturing quality will have a huge impact on the overall look and feel of your custom baseball hat!
As you shop around for the right manufacturer, keep an eye out for a company that…
Partners with top factories
- Offers excellent customer service
- Has an easy-to-use online platform
- Includes free design services with every order
- Doesn’t have any minimum order quantities (MOQs)
- Has fair pricing
- Offers quick turnaround times
- Has plenty of hat customization options
- Has lots of good reviews
- Guarantees customer satisfaction
Here at THE/STUDIO, we pride ourselves in checking all of those boxes!
If you do choose to go with THE/STUDIO to create and manufacture your custom baseball hats. You’ll then be prompted to choose the quantity you’d like to order before you’re ready to start customizing.
2. Customize your baseball hat
Next up, make your baseball hat your own! You can either choose options to create a classic type of hat or make it entirely your own. For a traditional baseball hat, choose the following options:
- Style – 5-panel, for a classic look.
- Material – 100% cotton twill (though all 10 materials offered are compatible with baseball hats!)
- Profile shape – Structured, to retain that classic 5-panel shape.
- Bill shape – Curved, for the classic baseball hat silhouette.
- Cap closure – Metal tri-glide, for a stylish, adjustable closure.
- Profile height – Medium, for a traditional baseball hat look.
Beyond these basic options, you’ll also be able to customize the packaging, exterior stitching, interior stitching, embroidery, and printing on your custom baseball hat to make it your own.
Are you still considering making a different type of custom hat? Click here to explore all of the different types of custom hats you can make at THE/STUDIO.
3. Design your hat
Now, it’s time to add your design, artwork, or team logo to your hat. If you’ve already decided exactly what you want to be embroidered or printed on the front of your hat, that’s great – simply upload a file and our team will take care of the rest. If you haven’t finalized your design, just describe your vision in detail and our in-house design team will handle the artistic part for you!
4. Approve a mockup
Once we’ve processed your order, we’ll send over a detailed set of photographs or a physical prototype so you can see what your finished products will actually look like. If you’re totally happy with it, great! But if you see anything you’d like changed, we’ll make any revisions free of charge before completing your entire product order.
5. Sell or give away your hats
After you approve the final design, we’ll move forward with production. You’ll then enjoy free domestic U.S. shipping on your entire order and receive your items straight to your doorstep. Then, all that’s left for you to do is sell or give away your custom-designed baseball hats !
