Tips for Designing Custom Hats and Beanies

There’s a lot to consider when designing headwear embellishments. Does the hat you’d like to use have a center seam? Are the beanies ribbed or very loose knit? Is your art too detailed to fit onto the available area on the hat or beanie? These are just some of the questions you’ll want to ask yourself before diving into your next headwear project. So just for you we put together this post to help as a guide.

It would seem that the easiest way to tackle this subject would be to break it out by category. Structured, unstructured, low profile and so on. Keep in mind that your project may be subject to more than one of these conditions. Another opening point here is that most of this information is pertaining to direct embroidery on the hats and beanies. Reason being is that direct embroidery is the most difficult to execute and has the most amount of limitations. This is mainly because of the three-dimensional nature of hats and beanies. We have many application solutions we can pull out of the tool box for your project depending on the complexity. Whether it’s embroidery, custom patches and woven labels, screen printing or digital and cut transfers we’ll always present you with the best practice for your custom headwear.

Custom Unstructured Hats

An unstructured hat is a hat that isn’t constructed with what’s called buckram. Buckram is a stiff cotton cloth that’s used to give hat styles like truckers their stiffness in the crown. The most common types of unstructured hats are dad hats, crushable hats and bucket hats. Unstructured hats are comfortable, casual and make a great customized product if you follow some simple guidelines.

First the crown on unstructured hats is almost always going to be low profile. This makes the decoratable field on the front of the hat about 3.5in wide X 1.75in tall. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for highly detailed art, make sure your art is bold and legible. Also due to the pliable nature of unstructured hats large embroideries can deform the crown so try and minimize the art if possible.

Temple and back embroideries are a good look. Just keep in mind that these locations on the hat are small so be realistic about the art you want to fit in there. We can embroider on the mesh but this is a place where we really stress simple bold art.

Another very common construction amongst unstructured hats is a center a seam in the front panel otherwise known as 6 panel. Here the seam creates a ditch that the embroidery can sort of fall into. Try and avoid small text and vertical lines across the center seam if you can. Let’s note here that we also avidly avoid placing transfers or printing over any seam on any product. It just doesn’t work well. A great solution for art that has small detail and must be placed over a seam is a custom patch or custom woven label.

Custom Structured Hats

Structured hats include truckers, ball caps and flat bills. We call them structured because the do have buckram in them making them ridgid in the crown. Structured hats are fashionable, professional looking and great for embellishment as long as you know the best practices when decorating them.

Typically structured hats have a taller crown creating a little more space to put your art and logos. The optimum embroidery field here is going to be about 2in tall X 5in wide. Structured hats are rather stable so slightly more complex art is achievable when embroidering them. Screen printing is another great process for structured hats and way to keep it affordable for promotional type projects. Again though, really try not to print over the center seam and consider a 5 panel for your printed hat project.

Structured hats can be both 6 panel with center seam and 5 panel with no center seam. Both embroider well but again there are limitations with embroidering over the center seam. Particularly if you’re interested in puff embroidery because the center seam and the buckram add a lot of material for the embroidery machine to punch through. This is why we recommend that you use a 5 panel or avoid embroidering over the seam for puff embroidery projects.

Structured hats can be either mesh-back or full-twill and the same rules apply as above for temple and back embroiderys. Keep it simple and even simpler if your wanting to put it on mesh.

Custom Foam Front Hats

There’s not a whole lot to talk about here but I do want to touch on the foam hats because they are so popular at our shop. As you probably know foam hats are the truckers that have an almost upholstery like foam crown on them. They are also available with all panels made from foam, we call the cheese hats and I’m not sure why.. Foam hats are great for promotional projects because they are affordable and easy to decorate.

We recommend printing for foam hats, whether is screen printing or transfers because both systems are economical. We don’t recommend embroidery for foam hats. because the sewing process mattes the foam down and deforms the hat.

Sublimation printing is another good process for decorating foam hats that’s affordable and great for art with high color counts. Just note that sublimation only works well on white material. So hats with white fronts are recommended.

Custom Loose Knit Beanies

Waffle, ribbed and chunky style beanies could all be considered loose knit. Loose knit beanies are a great look whether it’s on the ski hill or around town. Easy to decorate and affordable all beanies are great for promotional and retail projects alike. Loose knit beanies are any style that is knitted together in a loose nature opposed to bulk knit beanies that are a tighter knit.

Embroidering loose knit poses some challenges because the embroidery thread pulls into the yarn, the lack of stability also can deform the embroidery art. This is why we use unique stabilizer and a cross hatch base plate to provide a stable base to sew into. This is a great practice on all loose and lofty materials.

Custom Bulk Knit Beanies

Bulk knit beanies are the most commonly embroidered beanie style because they have a tighter knit making them more stable. We recommend them for any projects where the art has thin detail or spans a large area of the beanie. We will often still add a base platte if needed to stabilize the art if needed. Particularly on text, text that is not linked together by a base place can look a little bit like alphabet soup. We’ll use a tonal thread to the beanie color so the base plate is virtually invisible.

Patches and woven labels are also great ways to custom logo beanies. Screen printing is also option to customize bulk knit beanies, know though that when the beanie stretches over your head the knit on the inside weave can show through.

Every project is unique, that’s way it’s so important to go into production with a good plan that’s seeded from a knowledgeable sales team. Work with us and we guarantee that our service assortment and experience will show in the end product.

I think that pretty much wraps up this post, thanks for reading. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out.