Remember the last time you wore a hat and went out was? Please think before COVID hit us. Be it wearing those beautiful beaches or in the city while exploring a new city. Hats have always been one of the favorite accessories of people. For some people, the craze is so much that they prefer having a collection of it.
This craze and love of hats have helped many brands to come out with exclusive designs and whole segments of hats. Additionally, it even helped many people to start up with their own hats business or introduce a brand new collection of hats in their existing eCommerce website.
Talking about the eCommerce business, we all know how much people have shopped online during the pandemic. According to research done by Statista, over 2.14 billion people are expected to purchase products online. It shows the number of people shopping online and the market growth eCommerce holds.
In the long term, eCommerce is here to stay, giving people the opportunity to start with many options to sell their products. One of which is to sell hats online. Many existing businesses are starting new collections of hats along with other things, whereas some are setting it up from scratch.
A quick outline of entire guide:
- Things to Consider while you Sell Hats Online
- Decide your Printing Methods
- Sourcing Your Hats
- The Success Mantra for These Websites
- Marketing Strategies
If you are here to know how to start hat business, let’s get started.
In the post COVID era, travel and tourism are boosting, leading to more people purchasing hats and other items. Let’s start with how to sell custom hats step by step.
Things to Consider while you Sell Hats Online
Decide Budget
Budget is the most important and crucial thing when you start selling hats. The more defined and clear you are with budget planning, the more it will help you. Planning budget helps you decide and set certain goals for the next quarter, invest when and where needed, give you clarity on which product needs more attention, and more. It even helps get the right investors and gives a clear direction to existing investors about your next moves.
Define Target Audience
Clearly defining your target audience is necessary. There are two ways you can sell hats, either by B2B or B2C. Depending on your business model, you can decide which target audience you are planning to target.
In the B2C section, you can target end customers directly. You can understand their requirements, study market trends, and try to fulfill their needs. Another thing is B2C helps you to create your portfolio, which later helps you to target B2B.
On the other hand, if you plan to get bulk orders and want to target other businesses, B2B is a go-to option for you. Other businesses will help you to get bulk orders for their customers. Additionally, you can even go one step further and serve your customers custom hats. This will help you to connect with them emotionally and serve them right.
Select the Correct Technology
This is the crucial step as there are many technologies available in the industry, making it difficult to choose the best one. We can completely understand this dilemma. And to help you select one, let’s discuss some of them in brief.
Magento
It is the most preferred platform by companies when planning to create eCommerce websites. Magento is very popular because of its scalability, SEO friendly-ness, easy to integrate and customize eStores. Because of its open-source nature, it becomes easy for developers to customize and get support from other developers. It is the best solution when planning to upscale your eStore.
At the core, Magento is one of the strongest platforms when it comes to eCommerce. Looking at the demand for it, we have enriched our Magento product design tool. And results are worth trying for. Today most of our clients’ websites are scaled by the power of Magento and our product designer tool.
How can we help you?
Our Magento based Product Designer tool is developed keeping in mind all the complexities printing businesses were facing. Our mobile-first approach made it simpler for customers to create their own designs. It supports the latest Magento 2 version, so you don’t need to worry about integration difficulties. You need to purchase, integrate with the website, do needful configuration, and voila, you are ready to use the tool.
To make the web to print flawless, you can simply download it, make changes if needed, and send it for printing. These files are available in PDF, JPG, and PNG formats. In a few hours, you can sell custom hats once the extension integrates with your eStore. If this doesn’t suffice your need and you still need more features, we can help you with that too.
Shopify
Shopify makes your eStore run in hours because of the ease it provides to developers. Developers and businesses prefer it because of its ease to customize and integrate third-party tools. The intuitive designs, themes, customer supports, hosting, maintenance, and security services make it stand out.
The only drawback it has is the lack of options to customize your website fully. Despite this most, of the companies power-up their websites using Shopify.
The recent rush by the website developers towards Shopify inspired us to have a scalable and ready-to-integrate design tool for Shopify users. Our Shopify Product design tool is easy to integrate on Shopify websites. Many of our Shopify customers have integrated our tool into their website and provide a better customer experience.
Using our Shopify based product designer tool, you can make your eStore stand out. Simply integrate with your website, make needed configurations like; adding price, products, define product design area, and more. In a while, all these changes will reflect on your product page, and it is ready to go live.
WooCommerce
Its open-source nature makes it everyone’s favorite. It is easy to get support from other developers because of its large community support. Additionally, its open-source nature makes it easy for people to customize and integrate third-party tools.
Talking about cons, if you plan to integrate third-party tools, then it needs additional charges. In many cases, attaching plugins also make your website slow, and it takes time to load.
Each of these platforms is one of a kind in its own ways. Apart from these, our product design tool supports other coding languages such as PHP, Prestashop, Opencart, Dot.Net, and more. Each of them is helpful to start your eStore. But, the problem arises while customizing. Not all of them will be as easy as Magento to customize, configure and integrate.
This can often leave you confused, considering the budget, usability, and a number of other things that demand your careful consideration.
Having served in the industry for decades, we have helped many businesses sell a wide range of custom products. Our experts have served in the industry for years and help our clients from scratch to set up their eStore.
We have helped a number of start-ups on how to start hat business. We recommend you seek an active consultation with one of our experts for technology platform selection.
Decide your Printing Methods
There are multiple ways to print various designs while selling hats. Each of them brings their uniqueness to the table. Below are the two most popular types of printing methods useful. Let’s see them in brief.
Screen Printing
Screen printing is also known as serigraphy or silkscreen printing. It is a popular method used for a wide range of printing industries. It presses ink through a stenciled mesh screen and creates printed designs. Fabric and paper are mostly used surfaces, but using specialized ink can print wood, metal, plastic, or glass.
This method involves creating a stencil on a mesh screen and pushing ink tan to imprint your design on the surface.
Why is screen printing preferred?
One of the major reasons is because it produces vivid colors even on dark surfaces. The ink or paint also depends on the layers on the surface of the fabric or paper; this results in good quality print.
- Advantages
– Cost-effective for large quantities
– Easy to print on special garments
– Long-lasting and durable quantities
- Disadvantages
– Not a feasible solution for small orders
– Not environmentally friendly
– Needs more investment due to the use of multiple colors
Heat Transfer Vinyl
Heat transfer is a printing method used for applying special vinyl to garments via heat press. This can be applied as a single layer or through a complex design process.
It can be useful to print designs on surfaces where the usual methods cannot reach, for instance, a hat. They are a go-to solution for many printers because it produces high-quality results on any fabric. You can choose from a wide range of colors, numbering, or lettering and print them via a digital vinyl plotter.
Following are certain things to be considered when working with heat transfer vinyl
- Garments like combed cotton and polyester are best suited for vinyl heat transfer
- Not a goto solution when it comes to bulk orders due to more labor efforts
- Limitation in color choices
- Need utmost care while washing garments
- Designs should be in vector format
- The go-to solution for sports and uniform teams
Sourcing Your Hats
This should be the main part of your selling hats business plan. The question is how and from where you will get hats? Multiple suppliers sell hats online that sell their products in bulk and serve B2B solely. Research such suppliers and reach out to them.
You can tie up your business with these vendors and get ready-made hats for your business. Furthermore, using the product designer tool, you can create custom designs and sell your products.
You can give them orders of hats according to market trends and your customers’ demand. This helps them as well as give you more clarity on how to sell hats online. Additionally, you can even sell custom hats online and reach out to more customers.
The Success Mantra for These Websites…
Many companies are providing a wide range of collections of hats. Let’s look at some of these companies and see what they are doing and how they work.
Hats.com
They provide high-quality hats from their customers’ favorite designer brands. They are a go-to solution for purchasing hats in bulk order, like sports events or any social gathering. Additionally, they even provide free shipping on orders above $75. They can also help customers buy hats which are not in their collection.
Hatstore
Started in 2011, they have developed rapidly in the headgear sector. Today they provide various types of hats in more than 5000 products. Additionally, they even have their webs shops in various other countries like Finland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Since its inception, they aim to provide world-class services to their customers and options to choose from.
HatsUnlimited
It was founded in 1994 and since then has never failed to serve its customers. They provide only high-quality headgear items to their customers. They are known for selling hats in various designs, shapes, sizes, and colors. Moving ahead with an aim to provide better customer service, they provide free shipping to their customers on orders above $75.
Lids.ca
Lids are champions when it comes to having a sports hat. Along with a wide range of clothing, they also provide products for sports enthusiasts, be it, adults or children, at a reasonable cost.
Village Hat Shop
Village hat shops started in the US; they provide hats in a wide range, from sports or fashionable hats to cowboy hats. They even provide a good amount of discount to customers like free shipping and various coupon codes. Additionally, if you are someone who doesn’t know which type of hat to choose, then you can even talk with their experts.
Study these different examples in more detail if you wish to and then decide which type of services you aim to provide. Depending on your customers’ needs and market trends, decide your services to sell hats. At the initial level, you need to try out different marketing strategies to get customers. But, once you have a stable amount of customers, then you can start with additional services.
Talking about marketing strategies, let’s see it in more detail.
Marketing Strategies
Marketing your business is one of the essential things and one of the most important ways to increase your business’s ROI. There are various ways you can carry out different marketing strategies for selling hats.
Some of the common ways to sell hat are; Digital marketing, Influencer marketing, social media marketing, email and blog marketing, discounts on various products, etc.
Each of them is important for your business’s growth, but they need to be in a flow. Starting with digital marketing, if you plan to make your website stand out from the crowd on Google, then this is for you. There are two ways SEO and PPC. If you want instant results on various search engines, then prefer PPC. Whereas, with SEO, you will organically rank various search engines in a few months. Additionally, content quality too plays a vital role in ranking.
Influencer marketing is a new way of marketing. If your target audience is GenZ or millennials, then you can try this out. Thanks to various social media platforms, today we are having thousands of influencers. Reach out to them, explain your product and company, and you can sign them up. They will market your products to their followers on their social media accounts and increase your sales.
Social media marketing has become a basic and necessary part of businesses. Create your business accounts and get customers from there. To study your customers’ requirements, various social media platforms provide insights into your followers’ country, age, interests, and more. These tools help businesses to understand their followers better and provide them with better services. Email and blog marketing works wonders for your business. Create quality content, share your knowledge and expertise in the field, and help you get customers. In many cases, quality content helps businesses to rank on search engines and get leads.
At the initial stage, you can even provide your customers with various discounts on products. You can even add conditions like free shipping above a certain amount, coupon codes, start membership options, and more. All these things will help your business to attract more customers and sell better products.
Depending on your business model, decide which method you want to start using and then move forward. If you are still confused and want to know which of them will work for you, you can reach out to our marketing experts. We have helped many clients increase their sales with various marketing strategies.
Conclusion
Starting any business is difficult initially. And selling custom hats is no different. There is a lot of scope of selling hats in the market; rather, you are planning to exclusively sell hats or start a new collection to sell custom hats.
Follow these steps and start selling hats. The craze among customers and your services will not let you fail. Going further, you can even provide your customers with expert help and guide them in choosing the right hat.
If you are still confused and need guidance, then Brush your Ideas will be the right place for you. We have helped many customers for decades, from setting up their eStores to guiding at every level. Also, it helped them understand how customizing is the new way to sell out. Get in touch with our experts, and we will guide you through how to start hat business.
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