Custom Headwear Highlight: Full Fabric

With so many customizations and hat styles available, it’s often hard to pinpoint one that works for your business, it’s target audience, and your brands’ industry. In this post, we will overview our full fabric custom headwear style, popular for outdoor loving audiences.

Depending on your brand ethos, full fabric hats are extremely versatile in both fit and use. In addition to all of our custom work, we work with you to cut and sew a piece that is truly unique, incorporating your brand aesthetically and sending the message you’re looking to be heard by your target.

Available customization options for full fabric headwear include:

  1. Number of panels
  2. Fabrics
  3. Style profile
  4. Brim styles
  5. Closure styles
  6. Interior accents

What is a Full Fabric Hat?

Known as the quintessential baseball cap in looks, full fabric hats can also be described as “dad hats” or “baseball hats” and can be traced back to the iconic American baseball uniform. According to the New York Times, they were originally manufactured in standard sizes until the late 80s.

The adjustable strap was introduced to the structure of the cap, a feature that now has its own set of custom options from velcro to metal clasps. Depending on your target audience, you have to determine whether your target would prefer a smooth sliding metal closure or a quick tear-and-go sizing experience.

Custom headwear is truly all about those seemingly small details because those are the details your audience is looking for even if they don’t know they are looking for it; the details that trigger an “Oh, this is nice” reaction. Straight from the baseball diamond to today, full fabrics offer the opportunity to create a lot of different styles and features to communicate your brand's ethos.

Photo Courtesy of Obermeyer

Customizable full fabric hat features

Number of Panels

The number of panels determines a hat’s structure and shape. Full fabrics typically have five or six panels, all of which are opportunities to customize. Depending on your brand's identity, each panel can be handcrafted to relay that identity.

Crown Construction

The crown on any hat style is the vertical portion of the hat that covers a person's head, whereas the brim is the horizontal portion that sticks out from the hat's base from the forehead.

The Anthem Branding custom headwear program allows for brands to customize the construction of the crown to be either structured or unstructured.

Unstructured hats do not have the added front panel support, as in trucker hats, and they typically have the same material used on each panel. The crown construction on full fabric hats varies in styles and is typically where the front panels leverage a logo, patch, or another kind of decor on a vertical angle from the brim, ensuring the brand is prominent no matter the head size of the wearer or how the hat is worn.

Leverage these top three artwork techniques and patch styles on the front panels of a full fabric hat:

  1. Debossed logo or brand name
  2. Embroidered patch
  3. Screen printed patch

How Hapa Sushi uses full fabric hats to promote their brand and translate its ethos

Hapa is a term described as a “harmonious blend of Asian and American cultures.” Hapa Sushi is a Colorado-based Sushi Grill, and Sake Bar, motivated by traditional Japanese cooking.

Hapa leverages a structured full fabric dad hat to create an emotional connection with their servers, chefs, and customers. The traditional dad hat is representative of Hapa’s brand efforts to integrate American culinary culture within their cuisine.

A curved brim with a subtle design creates a longer-lasting connection with its wearer as it’s one of those surprise and delight features. The under brim screenprint placement is strategic, and just for that one person wearing it. While their iconic logo and typography complement the traditional cap, Hapa gave it a twist of their own.

Fabrics

Fabric selection is an essential decision when constructing unique promotional products. Consider your consumers, employees, and their needs. Do they need a heavier material to keep warm? Do they need a breathable material because they’re going to be working out in the hat? Before selecting a fabric for your company hat, ask yourself these questions.

Brim Styles

Brim styles are important for the overall look of a hat, no matter what style you’re interested in, we can customize the brim to be curved, slightly curved, or have a rounded or flat brim.

A functional aspect of your headwear collection, the brim shape sets the stage for the construction of the entire cap.

Interior Accents

Cut through the noise and speak directly to your target audience with subtle thoughtful details.

Interior accents and taping are the very last point of contact you have with your customer on a headwear piece, so use it to your advantage. Interior taping, strategic underbrim placements, quality labels and more are just some creatively subtle ways to create an emotional response.

For example, take this woven clamp tag on our custom Anthem dad hats. Based in Boulder, this small, but important details speak to who we are as an agency and what we value.

See what Anthem Branding can create for your brand.

Contact us to discuss your custom headwear ideas or designs knowing that we manage product line inventory, logistics, and everything in between so you can get back to what matters the most: growing your brand.