Hats, Embroidery, and where to start

What’s going on -

A lot of brands like to start with a hat as one of their first pieces. I think this is a great idea for a number of reasons.

• Hats are dope.
• If you use embroidery to embellish them you get a super professional look.
• Embroidery is straightforward and you don’t need vector artwork to get a good final product.
• Often you don’t need to run a huge batch to get decent pricing.
• There are a lot of local as well as online options for this service.

So, where to start?

1. Get your ideas going. Logo, concept, style etc. I don’t need to preach on this.
2. Make sure your artwork is a nice size file. It doesn’t have to be huge but don’t use a small little icon file. Aim for 300 ppi (pixels per inch) and at least a couple hundred pixels for width / height. You will send your jpeg to whoever is embroidering them.
3. Source your hats. If you are using a local service for embroidery you can either buy hats wholesale and bring / ship them to the shop for embroidery. You can also purchase hats through the shop if you don’t have a wholesale account (get yourself a wholesale account, it costs nothing and is good to have. There are tons of different sites for this.) If you are using an online service for the embroidery they most likely will make you purchase the hats through them. This is a good time to break open your wholesale account and check pricing to see how their prices compare. Compare these prices to your local shop.
4. Another way to save money if you are printing locals digitize your own artwork. It’s super cheap to find and online service that digitizes artwork and can save some $. For example a shop I was working with charged $45 for digitizing. I found the same service online for $12. Digitizing is essentially converting your artwork so the embroidery machine can read it. There are many different file types .TTF is a common one. Find out what file type your printshop uses and go from there!

As always feel free to hit me up with any questions, and check out this bundle of info over here ->

-Ben