Here are some key solutions when selecting caps, decorating, and then selling the product of your work. There are so many options during each of these three phases, or should we say opportunities to make mistakes? The 10 solutions below will point you in the right direction.

Identify the Cap Construction for Your Method of Decorating. Caps are decorated by embroidery, screen printing and transfers. The requirements of each are very different. If you buy a cap intended for screen printing or heat transfers with the intent of decorating by embroidery, you probably bought a problem. If you buy an embroidery cap with the intent to screen print, you will probably end up with gray hair and ugly disposition, or no longer offer caps.

The first solution to being successful with caps is to buy the cap made for the method of decorating you have selected. Embroidery requires a stiff front cap so the cap will not move out of registration when the needle is going through the fabric at machine gun rates. Screen printers need a flexible front cap to conform to the platen. Heat transfers are more complicated, because the fabric has to be selected according to the type of transfer that will be applied.

Embroidery requires a cap described in the supplier catalogues as constructed, structured or fused buckram. They are all the same. These are stiff front caps. If the front is too stiff, you might break needles, but most are made for needles. So if your business is embroidery, cross out all other cap descriptions, except half moon stay and wool caps, in your favorite cap supplier’s catalogue. Now you won’t buy the wrong cap by mistake. Customer’s will not be able to select a cap by color or other criteria without regard to construction.

Screen Printing requires caps that conform to the platen. Flexible front caps work best, and they are described as unconstructed, unstructured, and flexible front by suppliers. Half moon stay and foam fronts work with screen printing also. Be careful, because this is a critical decision that you want to make correctly. If a cap does not meet your selection criteria, put a big "X" over the cap and its description in the supplier’s catalogue so that you do not ever select this cap by mistake. That is the first thing I do with a new catalogue.

Embroidery vs. Screen Printing. There is at least one supplier now that includes a bold C when describing constructed caps and UC when the cap is described as unconstructed. This helps decorators, and should be an industry practice. The smart cap wholesaler that adds this information will have happier customers and increase their blank cap sales.

Constructed caps typically have material inside the cap which is different from the front panel that you will decorate. In most cases, the two pieces are fused or glued in some fashion. Avoid caps where these two pieces are not fused for embroidery. A half moon stay cap, by contrast, has the liner behind the front panel of the cap, but this liner is not attached. The liner can be folded out like the sweat band of the cap.

Half moon stay caps are both C and UC, and great for shops that both screen print and offer embroidery. Unfortunately, not a lot of cap wholesales have caught on to this marketing opportunity, and therefore don’t offer half moon stay caps.

With a half moon stay cap the decorator can fold the liner out of the cap along with the sweat band when screen printing, or leave the liner in the cap behind the front panel to be used as backing material for embroidery. This cap works great with multi-media decorating where a cap is first screen printed and then embroidered to create a product competitors do not offer.

When selecting a half moon stay cap look particularly at the liner. Some are similar to pellon material, which is great to work with, or material with a flexibility and thickness similar to the front panel. However, there are some liners that are hard plastic mesh that should be avoided. The hard plastic can break needles and are harder for screen printers to handle.

Heat transfers can be hot split, cold peel, or sublimation, to name the most popular. Sublimation requires a man-man fabric like polyester, that is white. The sublimation dyes do not stand up on top of the fabric like hot split and cold peel transfers, but rather absorb into the polyester fibers. The dyes tend to wick rather than produce the higher resolution and more opaque images from other methods of decorating. Sublimation transfers are commonly applied to the front white panel of a foam front, mesh back summer cap.

Hot split and cold peel transfers can go on any type of material. These transfers are screen printed images on paper, and appear upside down on the paper. The ink is flash cured to a gel state, but not fully cured. At a subsequent date the transfer is placed upon the front panel of the cap, and heat is applied with a cap heat transfer machine. The ink re-melts and fuses to the cap. If the paper is removed while the ink is still hot, that is called a hot split transfer. The image would feel like a screen printed image. If the paper is removed after the ink is cold, then the image would feel like a plastic coating.

The advantages of transfers are that you don’t invest in expensive embroidery equipment or have to learn the procedures of screen printing on a curved surface of a cap. Screen printing flat sheets of paper and applying transfers to caps, or producing a sublimation transfer on a computer printer, are relatively goof-proof. This method works well on low volume orders, or at retail locations where you do not know what color or style of cap a person wants until the customer is standing in front of you expecting a cap immediately.

The disadvantages of transfers are low volume sales and double work. It is double work to first go through all the steps of screen printing, and then have to apply the transfers to the caps one at a time relatively slowly compared to screen printing directly on the cap.

Pick the Cap Based on the Type of Customer. There are 5 and 6 panel
caps, either as high and low profile. Laugh if you want, but you can almost tell how old someone is by the cap they wear.

Children and young adults up to about age 35 wear a low profile, 6 panel cap. A 6 panel has the seam down the center of the image area. You have to decorate over that seam. These caps usually fit tight to the head, and the current fashion is to have a curved bill that is pulled down the forehead. An older person, particularly with a receding hair line, can be mistaken for a younger person when wearing one of these caps.

From about age 35 and older, people tend to wear 5 panel caps. These
caps do not have the irregularity of a seam to decorate over, and therefore are better to work with when first starting to decorate caps. There is an air space between the top of the cap and head to keep the person wearing the cap cooler on hot days working outside or playing golf and other sports. The cap wholesalers frequently feature the number of grommets in a cap for air to pass through the cap presumably to keep the person more comfortable.

To wear a foam front, mesh back cap, you need to be over age 65 or be on a skateboard. These are the only people, with rare exception, that order these caps that are now being called "trucker caps."

People who are closer to age 35 typically wear a lower profile 5 panel where the image area from the bill to the peak of a cap is 3" to 3 ¼". Older people tend to wear the cap of yesteryear that is 3 ½" and taller.

Keep Focus on What Works for You. Once you find the cap that works for you, stick with that vendor regardless of cost. If you change vendors or cap to save pennies, you will most likely buy dollars of problems. Production slows down, and you get misprints when you have the wrong cap. So avoid becoming a grouchy cap decorator.

For example, we print a 6 panel that we have found where the seam looks like it was ironed smooth. The stitching at the seam is tight, and that makes our job of printing easier and faster. Fast…that means more profit per hour. Wrinkled seams would either have to be embroidered or printed with 3-D ink to look good. Transfers might not work depending on how much irregularity there is to the wrinkle.

When the fabric is a twill, I look at how pronounced the twill is. A screen printed image would look saw-tooth, and therefore such a cap should either be printed with 3-D ink using capillary film, or be embroidered. A transfer would require a heavy ink deposit on the transfer paper.

Brushed cotton also needs to be approached with caution. Some are wonderful, and in fact, the best option when printing four color process on caps. Others are a deep pile that absorb a lot of ink making printing an opaque or 3-D image difficult without pulling the squeegee more than once. Of course, like wool caps, a deep pile brushed cotton is not a problem with embroidery.

There are two schools of how to screen print caps. One school professes that the best way to screen print a cap is with a curved screen over a curved platen. Curved screens do not have tension in the mesh, and so the companies that sell such cap printing devices recommend printing on-contact so that the mesh is supported by the cap to prevent the mesh from moving out of registration. The advocates of the curved method say they can print the fused buckram caps as long as the curve of the front panel fits the curve of the platen reasonably well. These cap printing equipment companies offer as many as nine different platens with their press to fit the different constructions of cap.

The other school starts with a flat platen. Among the different companies of the flat platen school there is a wide divergence of what to do next. Some caps can be stretched out of shape easily resulting in distorted images. Some companies therefore say the issue is how the cap is held in place during printing. All companies in this school typically profess tight screens and off-contact printing just like shirt printing so the mesh peels off of the garment leaving the ink behind.

One fact is for sure about screen printing caps. The cap devices offered are vastly different, and those options are how people get into trouble printing caps. This fact is the reason so many shops do not decorate caps. A lot of shops sub-contact decorating to an embroidery shop, because of the high probability that the embroidery quality will be good. With embroidery, the technology is in the machine. With screen printing, the technology is in the person and equipment, and most shops do not have equipment that they have been able to make work for them.

If you are thinking of screen printing caps, look at the finished caps of the person who is selling the caps. Make sure the images are symmetrical, that is, either the image includes straight lines, circles or text that is in a straight line so that you are sure that the cap device is not creating distortion. Also, make sure the images require multiple screens so that you know the machine and method allow consistent registration of screens. Then, you be the judge.

Offer Novel Decorations. Product differentiation is always the way to sell more product. If you sell the same product as the next shop, you have a price competition and low profit margins. So embroidery shops might offer multi-media images, or use unusual designs and threads to create appeal.

Screen printers can offer 3-D images which stand off the garment with very high resolution. That will get attention. Ink can be printed in layers or as half tone dots of 3-D ink on a layer of 3-D ink to create realistic images of basketballs. Specialty inks can be used for eye-catching effects like reflectives, photochromatic inks and suedes.

Solve Unique Decorating Problems with Caps, The image area is small, but the image on a cap is the image people see even before the larger image on a shirt. Without thinking, people compare the image to the bill of the cap. The bill is a reference point. So if the image is crooked even by 1/16", that is noticeable on a cap whereas an error by ½" on a shirt probably would not be noticed. The image also must be on center. The peaks of caps are seldom on center. On a 5 panel cap, center is judged by comparing the distance from the edge of the image to the seam of the front panel on each side of the image.

Each decorating method has it owns procedures that require strict compliance so that the higher standards of image placement that are required for caps are met. For transfers, for example, we find that cutting sheets of prints so that the image is exactly at the same location on the cut paper relative to the edges is critical. We also cut the sheets exactly square on a cutting board. When the paper is cut so the edge is parallel to the image, then placing the image on the cap to be parallel with the bill is easy. With screen printing we use a bill support so the images are always parallel to the bill of the cap. When buying and using decorating equipment, you want to be sure you know how you will be able to consistently place the image when compared to the bill and panel seams.

Investment Costs. There are very substantial investment cost differences between the different decorating methods. Embroidery equipment might cost $20,000 per head, and depending on stitch count, you might need 6-15 heads to keep an operator busy. Then there is also the cost of digitizing and computer software. The investment cost is high, but with reasonable training anyone can produce a consistently good looking product.

Screen printing equipment with a cap printing device, the smaller screens cap printing requires, smaller squeegees and such can cost from a couple of hundred dollars to a few thousand depending on what a person selects. The cost is a small fraction of embroidery equipment. However, the learning process to be good at cap printing is greater for most people. The pieces produced per hour can be much greater also. Printing 150 one color caps per hour is not unusual, and 4 colors can be printed at 50 per hour.

Transfer machines can be purchased for $250 to under $1000, and are easy to operate. The transfers can be purchased as pre-prints from a variety of transfer companies, or a decorator can screen print their own, custom transfers. Printing your own transfers also will be better when the number required is low or you need them in a hurry. However, you have to be a screen printer.

Fashion and personalization always sell at higher prices than a commodity available to anyone. That is why the skate boarders will pay $20 for a foam front you can buy from your wholesaler for less than $1, and the ink maybe costs as much as 2 cents. The fashion is to wear one of these "cool" caps most people would not wear even on a bet crooked on the head. Fashion often is associated with emblems people identify with like the longhorns of Texas. So you want to find the images and markets that allow you to be the only decorator selling the product so you can charge prices higher than for just any image on a cap.

Sell Jobs that Produce the Greatest Profit per Hour. High selling price does not mean high profit. The objective of a business is total profit, not profit margin alone. Total profit comes from profit margin times pieces per hour that you can decorate.

Leverage Your Business with Caps. Promote, promote and promote using your advantage over competitors using products that catch the attention of the public. Promoting with shirts might draw lower price competition, but competitors that cannot match your offer with caps will not react. When customers buy caps, then sell them shirts, jackets and fleece with the caps. Caps can be the key to growing your business ever more profitably.