How to Create Custom Hats for Your Team
Whether you’re the coach of a little league baseball team, the manager of a large team in your office, or simply a huge fan of your favorite football or baseball team, that feeling of belonging to a larger group is a powerful one. It’s a feeling of community, a sense of pride, and a great motivator. And the stronger a team is, the better it performs. If you’re looking for a way to inspire your fellow team members and foster a sense of genuine team spirit, custom hats for your team are the way to go.
Custom hats are so much more than just a way to cover up a bad hair day. When created thoughtfully, they bring people together and show affiliation in a stylish way. Plus, they’re easy to wear and useful enough to be repped year round.
If you’re interested in creating custom hats for your team, you have a lot of decisions ahead of you – everything from what type of hat to create to the unique design to the embellishments added to the overall production quality. But don’t be overwhelmed! As long as you partner with a great manufacturer, it’s easy to create 100% customized hats for your entire team. We’ll walk you through the entire process!
We’ll help you determine whether it’s a good idea to make custom hats for your team and teach you how to create a beautiful custom hat, step by step.
Should I Create Custom Hats for My Team?
If you’re interested in boosting team spirit and creating a fun, wearable way for your team members to show off their membership, creating custom hats may be a great idea.
However, you’d also best make sure that creating custom hats for your team is something your team would be interested in… and that there’s enough interest to justify the price. Consider these factors before designing and creating custom hats for your team:
Order size
Many custom hat manufacturers set stringent minimum order quantities, often 100+ units. THE/STUDIO has no minimum order quantities, but you’ll enjoy a steep discount if you place an order that’s on the larger side. So you can place a custom hat order for any size of team – just be prepared to pay more if your team is really small.
Price point
If you’re planning on selling your custom hats to your team or to fans of a team, consider how much your potential customers would be willing to pay. You’ll want to sell the hats for a high enough price to both account for all of your costs and make a profit. If you’re planning on just giving the hats away to employees or team members, consider how much you can afford to spend per hat.
Purpose
What will your hats be used for? Will your little league baseball team wear them during games to keep the sun out of their eyes? Will your office team wear them with a regular old outfit on casual fridays? Will soccer fans wear them in a hot outdoor stadium during the summer? Will hockey fans wear them in the chilly ice rink? Having a clear idea of what your custom hats may be used for will help you not only determine whether your team members have a use for them at all, but also what type of hat you should create when the time comes.
Interest
No need to resort to pure guesswork – if you aren’t sure whether your team would wear or enjoy custom hats, ask around! Set up a team meeting to determine what type of custom products your team members might wear and appreciate, or send out a survey to your customers to figure out what sort of fan merch they’d be most interested in. If custom hats don’t seem to be a very popular option, you can always create custom patches, custom pins, custom socks, custom stickers, custom keychains, or custom lanyards for them instead.
Style
Though all of your members certainly have team spirit in common, style is something that can vary greatly from person to person. Consider whether your team members have similar enough tastes that creating matching custom hats would make sense. If you’re not sure, you could always request a mockup of two different hat styles and present them to your team to see which is more popular. (Or better yet, order both and offer a choice so everyone gets their favorite!)
Of course, the decision of making custom hats for your team and what type of hats you ought to create also varies depending on the type of team you’re talking about.
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Creating Custom Hats for a Local Sports Team
Creating hats for a local sports team you coach or play on is a great way to turn a group of people who play together into a true blue team. Before you place an order for custom hats, be sure to check the team’s allotted budget and/or whether team members would be willing to pay for hats, even if you only charge enough to cover your costs. If you have a lot of local fans or parents who attend games, you could always sell extra hats at the ticket counter, too!
If you’re creating custom hats for a local sports team, look into making custom baseball hats with the team’s logo embroidered on the front or simple five-panel hats in your team’s colors.
Creating Custom Hats for a Major Team
You may not be a part of a major league baseball team or an NBA team… but when you’re a big enough fan, it may feel as though you are! Creating custom hats for a popular sports team can be a very lucrative business decision. They’re perfect to sell in your online store to fellow super fans. You could make baseball hats with MLB team emblems on them, snapback hats with NBA team logos on them, beanies with NFL team logos on them, trucker hats with soccer team logos on them… the possibilities are endless! You could even focus on a favorite player’s number or the team mascot in your design instead.
Creating Custom Hats for a Company Team
Boost employee morale and spread the word about your awesome company with custom team hats. Creating custom hats or other merch is a great way to help employees feel more appreciated and promote community in the office. You could create custom hats that feature your company logo, your company name, or even an inside joke at the office. If you make extras, you could even give custom company hats out to clients or customers as well!
How to Create Custom Hats for Your Team
Now that you’ve determined whether creating custom hats for your team is a good idea and you’ve started to envision how those finished hats might look, you’re ready to start creating!
No need to knit a beanie or sew your own snapback – with the help of on-demand custom product manufacturers like THE/STUDIO, you can customize and design every aspect of your hat online and leave all of the production to the experts. You could have your products perfected and in-hand in just a matter of weeks!
Here’s how to create custom hats for your team online, step by step:
1. Find a manufacturer
First up, start looking for a trusted manufacturer who offers fair pricing. After all, the end result of your custom team hats depends largely on the quality of the materials and processes your manufacturer uses! And the difference between a quality custom hat and a cheap one can be enormous.
Of course, you can’t very well vet every company you’re considering partnering with by visiting their factories in person… so how can you be certain you’ll get a great value?
Especially if this is your first time creating a custom product online, look for a manufacturer with the following qualities:
- Partners with top factories
- Offers great customer service
- Fair pricing
- Free shipping
- Offers multiple types of hats
- Offers excellent customization options
- Offers free design services with every order
- Fast turnaround time
- Low MOQs
- Great reviews
- Satisfaction guaranteed
THE/STUDIO is a great option that checks all the boxes. If you choose to partner with THE/STUDIO, you’ll start the product creation process here with our easy-to-use DIY tool. Once you choose how many units you’d like to order and review base pricing, you’re ready to start getting creative!
2. Choose the hat type
Next, it’s time to decide what type of hat you want to create. If you’re creating hats for a baseball team, making a baseball hat might be a no-brainer… but you have so many customizable options to choose from, including beanies, trucker hats, dad hats, snapback hats, five panel hats, and more. Consider your team members’ or customers’ needs and preferences before you settle on one type.
Determining which type of hat you’re setting out to make will help you determine which style, material, profile shape, bill shape, and more to choose. Learn more about the 6 most popular hat types and how to create them with THE/STUDIO here.
3. Customize your hat
Let your creativity run wild! Beyond the basic hat type you choose, THE/STUDIO allows you to customize so many different features, including:
- Style – Choose from a 6-panel, 5-panel, or 5-panel with pinch-tuck style.
- Material – Choose from 100% cotton twill, cotton/poly twill, corduroy, poly mesh, full color printed twill, 70% acrylic/30% wool blend, faux suede, faux leather, faux satin, or screen printed twill
- Profile shape – Choose from a structured, unstructured, or foam structure build
- Bill shape – Choose whether you’d like a curved or flat bill
- Cap closure – Choose from a plastic snapback, velcro strap, custom fitted, metal tri-glide, metal bronze buckle, plastic tri-glide, custom metal buckle, faux leather strap with custom buckle, one size fits most, or plastic snapback with custom logo closure.
- Packaging – Choose whether you’d like to add a patch, a hang tag, or a label to your custom hat.
- Profile height – Choose from a low, medium, or high profile.
- Exterior – Choose to add on woven eyelets, woven top button, custom bill stitching, nylon mesh back panels, sandwich bill, metal eyelets, metal top button, or custom piping details to your hat’s exterior.
- Interior – Choose to add on a solid-colored sweatband, a custom printed sweatband, a mesh sweatband, an elastic sweatband, solid-colored taping, or custom-printed taping to your hat’s interior.
- Embroidery – Choose whether you’d like embroidery in one or more locations.
- Screen-printing – Choose whether you’d like to add screen printing in one or multiple colors on your hat.
Note that some of these customization options and add-ons do come at an additional cost.
4. Design your hat
Next up, it’s time to submit your hat design! If you’ve already dreamed up a design you’d like printed or embroidered on the front of your hat yourself, simply submit your design (even if it’s hand-drawn or scribbled on the back of a napkin!) along with some notes if desired.
If you’re not much of an artist, don’t worry! Submit whatever you have (even if it’s just inspo photos you found on Pinterest or a stick drawing) along with detailed notes about your idea and our expert design team will take it from there. (Design services are totally free with every order!)
5. Approve a mockup
Our design team will take whatever direction you’ve given them and turn it into a beautiful custom hat. Before beginning production on the rest of your order, you’ll receive a mockup of your custom hat, whether as a physical prototype or detailed photos.
If all looks great, approve the mockup and we’ll move forward with production! If you see anything you’d like changed, say the word and we’ll tweak it as many times as it takes to get it right. (Free of charge, of course!)
6. Sell or give away your custom hats
After you give the go-ahead, you’ll enjoy free domestic shipping on your entire order and receive your products within the quoted timeline. Then, it’s time to distribute your custom hats to your team or sell them to your customers! They’re gonna love them.
Ready to start creating custom hats for your team? Start the process here.
