We’ve been making hats almost as long as we’ve been making t-shirts, though on a much smaller scale. For just as long, we’ve been asking ourselves, “why can’t we sell hats on demand? People seem to like ‘em.” Well, now we can.

We are very pleased to officially announce our on demand embroidery program. What you see below are real photos of real hats that are really available to buy right now. The quality is fantastic. We’re using the exact same hats and machines that we use for our stock and campaign embroidery. The only difference is that on demand embroidered hats are available 24/7 and ship within a week.

Let’s get those questions and answers out of the way. Especially the Big One.

Can I make a hat?

Possibly! That’s not a “no”, but it’s also not a “yes”. It’s complicated. We’re very constrained right now on the new product creation side, and we’re still evaluating the production process as well. If you are curious, please feel free to email us. We can say that the interest has been phenomenal. We’re accelerating our plans to build a self-serve tool for creating embroidery products. It’s something we intend to deploy widely as soon as possible.

Can I use whatever color thread I want?

You can use whatever color thread you want as long as it is in the list of 15 colors we offer. Said colors include red, orange, gold, brown, lime green, forest green, cyan, sky blue, royal blue, navy, purple, pink, black, white, and silver. If you’re more of a visual learner, here’s a PDF you can use.

What kinds of hats do you have?

We’ve got low-profile dad hats, flat-brimmed snapbacks, and mesh-backed trucker hats, withand without ropes. Hat colors are black, black, black, black, black, navy, and dark grey. Just kidding, we also have light blue and light khaki available in the dad hats. Other colors maybe, possibly available upon request as we continue to build out and expand our catalog.

How much do hats cost?

The base costs for all hats is $30. Just like other on demand products, the default margin is $5 for a retail price of $35. You’re welcome to adjust that up or down as needed.

Are there any other limitations I should be aware of?

Yes. Thank you for asking. In general, the smallest details that can be rendered are about 0.04" (1mm). The smallest gaps that can be maintained are 0.01" (0.25mm). The max size on a hat is 5.5" x 2.25". Here’s a good way to think about it: for a medium size design of 1.5", you have canvas that is roughly 75 x 75 pixels. It’s possible to get creative with running stitches and contrasting stitch directions to show subtle detail, but the best hats are going to avoid squishing too much detail into too small a space. When in doubt, err in favor of smaller and simpler.

That’s it for now. 🧢

Sometimes you work hard all month, and… you have nothing to show for it. You can’t talk about the new on demand product that is almost ready, or the other new on demand product that is coming soon. You definitely can’t talk about the highly classified on demand products in development for the second half of the year, no matter how excited you are.

Who cares if there is a whole laundry list of site features, improvements, and optimizations that will eventually be shipping? They aren’t done.

Yet. Groundwork is being laid. Plans concocted. Bold strides taken. Seeds planted, as it were, to grow and be gathered when the time is right.

Not a joke, we have nothing to share. If you email us though, we might be able to squeeze you in to the beta for the almost-but-not-quite-ready products we have in the bag. Keep this one under your hat though, if you know what we mean.

Want to see real time stats for your product sales? Pop over to your account, view a product, and click through to the new “Sales Stats” page. Sales can be viewed by month, day, and most recent. Aggregated sales are also filterable by product attributes like color and size. Take a look, let us know what you think! We have several additional features we intend to add this year to better communicate product sales history. Stay tuned.

As the Twitter implosion continues unabated, we took a moment to revisit Cotton Bureau profiles and the support we offer for outbound links. Until today, your only options were Twitter, Instagram, and a generic link field to be used at your discretion. We’ve significantly extended that now to include some other networks you might have heard of including Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Dribbble, Behance, Github, Patreon, and, yes, Mastodon. If we missed your favorite, let us know. We can always add more if enough people are interested.

Speaking of Mastodon, we went ahead and created an official @cottonbureau account. If you’re looking for The Back Room Lite (or The Back Room, Slightly More Frequently Than Once a Month), look no further.

While we were sweeping, dusting, and moving the profile link furniture around, we also implemented support for URL-based verification. Cotton Bureau Elsewhere links now support rel="me" which means if you point them at one of your off-site accounts (like Mastodon), others might just see a fancy checkmark indicating your account is authentic.

Lastly, if all this talk of Mastodon has made you curious, please feel free to sign up using our @mastodon.social invite link. The front door has been closed for a while, but we found this secret loophole that allows all our friends to get in. Shhh, don’t tell anyone.

Unless you spent 2022 hiding under a rock (we wouldn’t blame you), you might have heard we started offering premium phone cases. The cases are tough (confirmed through more than a few drops in our personal testing), the printing is sharp, and the price is right. It’s our first new on demand product after apparel, but it won’t be our last. 😉

In user account land, we also consolidated payments, added a balance view, plus whole new sections dedicated to managing discounts and notifications. Speaking of discounts, we restored the friends and family discount and started handing out free shirt and phone case codes like candy (candy that you earn by selling, uh, lots of other candy). We revamped our discount engine as well to share the load and offer more of everyone’s favorite promotion, free shipping.

The public site received some love as well with searching, filtering, and sorting for stores and featured products for premium stores. The home page got a slight tweak to increase emphasis on our favorite products. (New stuff is great! But we have 10 years of amazing designs that deserve to be seen.)

In one of our favorite developments, we kicked off this very email which enjoyed a strong six month run last year and is now entering a second healthy season of sharing updates with all of you lovely people.

What’s new in 2023? 🥳

The Beta List

When we rolled out phone cases last year, we issued a call for some courageous early adopters to help us test things before they were ready for prime time. That worked so well, we want to expand and improve that program. If you are interested in being the first to know about (and trial) new products, reply to this email. Before we make something available to everyone, we want your feedback on the product quality, the website interface, etc. As a bit of a preview, we are planning one major new product category this year plus 2–3 smaller product introductions from our existing partners. Space is limited, we are not going to be able to accommodate everyone.

Stock Products for All

If you’ve ever seen a sticker on Cotton Bureau, or an enamel pin, or a poster, a mug, or fancy socks, you might have wondered how you could get in on that. Until now, we haven’t been ready to open up stock products to everyone. That changes this year. If you are interested in selling something that isn’t available through our on demand program, email us. We’ll walk you through everything, it’s super simple.

There are some costs with stock products, so let’s get that out of the way.

• Product setup (including assistance with procurement) is $49 and includes one free product photo.
  
• You gotta actually buy all that product. Prices vary, of course.
  
• Accounts with at least one stock product are just $5 / month, deducted automatically from your existing sales.
  
• All stock product accounts include $5 of free product storage per month which is enough to cover hundreds of enamel pins, thousands of stickers, or an entire department of designers with notebooks, pens, and prints.

The Inevitable Price Changes

Effective immediately, on demand apparel prices have been bumped up a few bucks. You don’t need to do anything. Retail prices on the site have been updated by the same amount, so your margin hasn’t changed. If for some reason you prefer to reduce your cut, feel free to reach out to us. You can do that directly in your account, or we can handle it for you. At this point it is our hope (and expectation) that inflation has eased enough that when we sit own to review the global economy in January 2024 no further changes will be necessary.

No increase has been made to phone case prices as that product was introduced late enough in the world-wide inflation cycle that our costs were fully known.

For those of you with stock products, a slight adjustment to our fulfillment fees is coming there as well (effective February 1). We’ll be emailing you all separately about those changes.

Finally, after 6+ years of free storage for stock products, our warehouse costs have increased to the point that we are no longer able to avoid charging for inventory management. Again, for anyone with stock products, those prices and more information will be communicated directly. Our intention is only to cover our costs on those items, so prices should be minimal.

What Else?

It’s not our habit to pre-announce features as the exact timing can be difficult to nail down and the scope can shift significantly during development. However, there’s something to be said for a little look ahead every so often.

Philosophically, we divide our time roughly equally between maintenance, quality of life / site features, and new product development (e.g. phone cases). We’ve already mentioned the plan to onboard one major new partner this year with an entirely new product category. While we don’t want to get into too much detail, it’s going to be a pave-the-cowpath sort of product. We’ve offered items like this as stock products before. Now we’re taking the next step to make it available on demand.

On the maintenance side, there are a number of behind-the-scenes tasks that aren’t of interest to anyone except perhaps other developers. We’ve got servers and libraries to upgrade plus a few crusty bits of code to whip into shape. Boring stuff like how product images are generated and stored over time becomes a drag on more exciting things we would like to do.

Other than that, some much requested smaller features are on the docket (ahem, multiple print locations) along with a few fun customer-focused ideas, and, if the stars align, maybe one idea that has been on the to do list for 10 years will finally happen.