New Era Hats: Work board June 17

How I got a New Era collection, a step by step process, and my inspiration

In the first entry of The putyouon Playbook, I mentioned how I planned on dropping a couple products that made sense to the platform: Hats and Hoodies. Why does this make sense? Well… because I wear them in pretty much every piece of content I put out. I’ve become in love with hats and they’re my version of a sneaker head’s obsession with shoes.

June 26, 2023 was the very first hat drop. I pressed all the hats by hand with a $120 hat press (Get one here)

The hats I sourced from the fashion district in DTLA. They cost me about $4.50 per hat, I bought every last dark green one I could find in that store, which was only 24. But I wanted to do a limited run anyways so this was fine for me, plus I preferred to spend around $100 anyways. I pressed them using Vinyl heat transfer from www.proworldinc.com that cost me about $50 for the vinyl sheets (there’s a minimum purchase). So for about $270 I was ready to go. I of course saved money pressing these myself plus I wanted to ensure the quality for my first drop.

I had been building a text list for the hat drop on my site that was accumulating members for a couple months so I didn’t need to run any ads or push any posts about the drop beforehand, simply using the text list as my audience. I made the hats live on June 26, and they all sold in less than an hour. The photoshoot I did of the hats was for two purposes: to create social proof and a post that the hats had sold out, and also to get content to push for hat drop #002

I then did hat drop #002 on November 16 2023. This was a slight fail for the community, as I had just 12 hats to drop, and all 12 got grabbed before the link went live because I forgot to change the site password and people used the password from drop 1 when they went to the site and before the drop was live there were none left. I learned my lesson on that drop, and I also learned a couple other things as well:

1. I need to have more hats in the next drop

2. I want to increase the quality of these hats

3. I want a different style of hat

I spoke previously about how I eventually got a plug at New Era. But to recap, I attended an in person meet up for my favorite podcast called Group Chat in Venice. When I was there, I recognized a dude who was a past guest on the pod. He's the owner of a hat store in LA and I learned a lot about them after that pod. So I approached him wearing the green trucker and mentioned that I did two sold out drops of this hat, and I was looking to move on to a different style. He told me he had a plug at new Era for licensing hats and I told him I would send him an email with more information about putyouon and myself. So this just shows the importance of getting out and MEETING PEOPLE.

Now for the style and design.

After emailing and catching him up on putyouon, he had me fill out a couple forms and requested an Adobe Illustrator file of the designs. But I didn’t know what design I wanted to do… My hat inspo board looks like this:

One design that I’ve been trying to get on the back of some hoodies is this one:

It’s one of my favorite designs I’ve ever made. It shows the date and purpose for starting putyouon, and the words break up to reveal a P for putyouon. So I wanted this to be the design for the first hat. I also like the look of words on the front of hats like these from my hat inspo board:

Recently, my preferred style of hat to wear is the New Era 9Forty A frame hat. I fell in love with it after my trip to NYC and visiting the Mecca: Hat Club NY

So I figured this drop could be a perfect one for this style and this is what I’m going for. It will be embroidered, and I also am working on the designs for a patch like the hats above. Want to get creative with this. I sent my initial design to them like this:

So this process may be a little more expensive and take longer to produce, but I think this step up in quality with one of the biggest hat companies in the world will be a way to legitimize the hat business as I progress. I really think that I could build a sizable hat business that could eventually scale, but for now I’m just having fun and learning a LOT.

I’ll show you my hoodie process as well as the photoshoot I did by myself in Santa Monica recently. That will be a future work board piece, but for now leave any questions below and I’ll get to all of them.

-Steve