How Custom Fitted Hats Have Become Must-Have Collectors’ Items

Farnham, who helped spur this trend by placing a pink undervisor on the NY Yankee cap, is now Hat Club’s main headwear designer alongside Jon Nguyen, known in the hat community by his IG handle @t800jon. Farnham began as a sales associate at Hat Club’s New York store in 2013. Nguyen started with the company in 2007 as a sales associate at one of its Arizona locations. Now, they are creating the hats that keep moving this trend onward. The duo has continued to capitalize on the momentum of the pink bottoms with dozens of new, experimental custom collections that arrive weekly, usually on Saturdays. The “Pink Lemonade” drop in October 2020 featured all-yellow options for each MLB team with pink UVs. The “Breakaway” collection released in March 2021 fused MLB team logos with the colors of their city’s NHL counterparts—a Mets cap was colored with navy blue, teal, and orange to match Islanders jerseys from the ’90s, or a Chicago Cubs cap nodded to the Blackhawks’ red, black, and yellow palette. Once limited to NoHo’s location, the pandemic has shifted these releases to Hat Club’s online store, expanding the reach and notoriety of the brand. While the duo says the creative process for each collection varies, Farnham and Nguyen often find out quickly that they both have similar ideas brewing when they discuss new projects.

Hat Club is considered to be the forefather of the trend, but other retailers have been capitalizing on it too. MyFitteds, a small, family run shop located in Paterson, NJ, since the ’90s and operating its online store since 2005, is currently producing some of the more creative designs on the market. Founder John Jang and his team of designers, Kenny Lu and Kevin Alejo, are peddling caps that pull from plenty of categories. A Yankees cap covered in woodland camo that dons a purple Yankees logo is a nod to Raekwon’s legendary “Purple Tape.” A Red Sox cap released in late February featured a colorful, layered Boston Red Sox logo on the crown, a nod to the Necco Wafers candy that is produced in the city. Jang has even used his children’s favorite books for inspiration, flipping a Rockies cap (usually black and purple) with the earthy tones used on Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House covers, or a Minnesota Twins hat (navy blue and red) to look like covers from Roald Dahl’s Matilda series with blue, yellow, and pink details. It’s a unique approach in comparison to many shops that are simply flipping MLB caps with new colors, and it adds an extra layer of storytelling.

“My team and I, we think outside of the box. We draw inspiration from the most random things… [Other shops are] just throwing colors at the wall and seeing what sticks. I can’t take that approach… I’m always quality over quantity,” says Jang, who tells Complex that the timeline from ideation to receiving a shipment is about a three to four-month process. “Two years ago, I wouldn’t have thought to hit 10K followers on Instagram. Now we’re almost at like, 75K in a matter of a year and a half. Kenny, Kevin, and I are pumping out new designs daily and submitting them to New Era because of the demand.” 

Another recent creation from Jang and the MyFitteds team was a forest green cap embroidered with a large, gold pegasus. The design was a nod to Uptown Jiggie (aka Pegasus), a hat shop that was stationed in East Harlem and viewed as a cornerstone of the community before closing in 2013. With all of the attention being paid to the hat world right now, especially in the tri-state area, Jang wanted to use his platform to properly honor one of its OG mom and pop shops.

“I had to pay homage to them, because in a way, they fueled my competitive spirit to design greater things,” says Jang, who notes plenty of OG collectors who reminisced when the design came out back in February. “It’s a good thing that I brought it back out because those guys were amazing, and they were really good at what they did. It just sucks that they don’t exist anymore.”