Custom Headwear Highlight: Trucker Hats

Clients like RepYourWater, Lazarus Brewing, Greensky Bluegrass, and Sweet Cow use trucker style custom headwear to connect with their audience and grow their brand. Let’s review the available customization options for this best-selling hat style.

In this article, we will cover the following customization points:

  1. Number of panels
  2. Crown construction
  3. Closure styles
  4. Brim styles
  5. Interior accents and taping

Trucker hats are a nod to the working man (or woman)

Trucker hats were popularized as an affordable and practical promotional brand marketing tactic by farming supply companies like John Deere, thanks to the style's traditional use of breathable fabrics, mesh backing, and snapback size adjustability.

Now, the trucker-style hat dons celebrities like Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher, professional athletes like David Beckham, and even politicians.

Customizable trucker hat features

Number of panels

The number of panels determines a hat’s structure and shape. Depending on your brand and the business goals around having a custom headwear program, you can achieve a different overall look by the number of panels.

Trucker hats typically have six panels – two full fabric panels in the front, and four mesh panels wrapping around the back.

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 crown of a trucker hat to be either structured or unstructured. Traditionally, trucker hat crowns have a structured construction, meaning that the front two panels of the hat have added fabric support.

This produces the iconic trucker style look 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.

Unstructured hats do not have the added front panel support and typically have the same material used on each panel.

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

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

How RepYourWater uses structured trucker hats to promote their brand and translate its ethos

RepYourWater, a Colorado-based apparel brand dedicated to providing unique designs and gear for anglers and hunters, leverages the structured trucker hat style to not only offer their customers a useable branded piece but to increase support of local conservation and inspire exploration.

The popularity and usability of their custom trucker headwear collection is a great tactic that drives sales-based donations for conservation efforts, a core pillar of the RepYourWater brand.

Closure styles

Quality and thoughtful items consider all the details. Whether we realize it or not, details are truly what make up the design. Thoughtful details are elements that are going to help you build an emotional connection with your brand to your audience, yet many effective ways to do so are often underutilized and overlooked.

Custom headwear closure styles options include:

  1. Snapback
  2. Velcro
  3. Cloth or leather strap-metal clasp

Consider the end use of the hat and your target audience to find a closure style that fits into your brand.

Brim styles

Hat brims are one of the most important functional parts of a hat and what gives a hat it’s the final personal touch. You can customize the brim to be curved or slightly curved, or have a rounded or flat brim.

Depending on your brand voice and personality, your brim should be used help narrate your brand story while maintaining it’s a critical role in keeping the sun out of a person’s eyes.

Interior accents and taping

Interior accents and taping are the very last point of contact you have with your customer on a headwear piece, and there is no doubt that you want your brand to leave an everlasting impression.

These customizations are often a top favorite as they are more subtle than other options and when done well, it's these surprise and delight moments that create an emotional connection.

The use of these customizations make the piece authentic to your brand and tells whoever wears it that you went above and beyond to cut through the noise and do something different.

Partner with Anthem Branding to create a custom headwear collection for your brand

Clients like RepYourWater partner with Anthem Branding time and again to create extensive custom headwear collections, which often is a heck of a lot to manage for a growing business.

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