Manufacturing Baseball Caps

This week, due to the holidays, we had to send Hong Kong staff to Dongguan in Canton Province for Quality Control on a rushed order.   Always great to get our merchandisers to visit factories instead of just mainly sending our QC staff -merchandisers know the client and know first-hand information on the production requirements etc..   This time we inspected baseball caps and wanted to share with readers some info on production.

Manufacturing a baseball cap seems easy but there are a lot of steps and options. Factory managers need to coordinate all the raw materials to make for an order to succeed.  In order to get the correct pantone colour and materials, the factory asks different suppliers to gather any range of materials and colour dyes.   There are many great options for more green materials like bamboo.

Here are some key items/options for consideration…

• Embroidery of logo after getting the cap dyed.
• Stitching in care labels and logos
• Printing any Silk Screen messages/designs
• Clasps with metal, plastic clips or Velcro
• Metal or sewn air vents
• Interlining, backing for embroidery, lining etc..

How about more unique components like these:

• Crocodile clips (fix cap to your shirt – stops it blowing off in high wind)
• LED Reading lights
• radios
• Bottle opener
• Golf ball marker
• Sunglasses Holder
• Pls. let us know any new ideas

Then the caps are Sewn together with all the optional extras that can be added to make the cap unique.   Finishing the overall of the caps, they will use a expanding machine to fix the shape of the caps. One by one they pump caps to make the shape. Subsequently, they will have a small group of workers to follow up on inspecting every cap – cutting off any untrimmed lining and threads.   This is very cumbersome work.

As the goods are approved by the factory inspectors, another group of workers will start the packing up and boxing it up in cartons.  Quality Control by our team is also done at this stage – it is one of the key services provided by ODM.    Each time before shipping products out to our clients we send an experienced inspector to check a random sampling from the shipping cartons.

Recently there has been many orders for caps and we are experiencing longer time lines for production of new orders.   Maybe some of this is due to world cup or the fathers’ day?

Click for more ideas on promotional caps/hats…