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NBWA Associate Member Branded Bills breaks down key considerations — including design, audience and marketing objectives —  for making your swag sing.

By Lisa Shrigley, Director of Marketing, Branded Bills

Walk into any beer distributor’s warehouse, and somewhere, usually in a back office, sometimes in a closet, you’ll find a box of hats. Maybe two boxes. They were ordered for a sales meeting three years ago, or for a brand launch that came and went, and they’ve been sitting there ever since because nobody actually wanted to wear them.

That box represents a problem most distributors don’t think of as a problem: a merch program designed without a clear sense of who it’s for.

Headwear is one of the highest-leverage marketing assets a distributor has. A hat travels into bars, ballparks, tailgates, and grocery stores, exactly the places beer is sold and consumed. It generates impressions for years, not the length of a campaign. And unlike a billboard or a digital ad, a hat only works if a real person decides, every morning, that they want to put it on. That’s the bar.

The distributors who get the most out of their headwear programs share one thing in common: they design those programs around three distinct audiences, not one. Employees. Retail accounts. Consumers at events. Each of those groups wears a hat for different reasons, and a program built for all three at once tends to fail all three at once.

Audience One: Your Employees

Your route sales team, your warehouse staff, your delivery drivers: they’re the most visible representatives of your distributorship in the market every single day. A driver in a branded cap making twelve stops a day at retail accounts is generating more meaningful brand exposure than most paid media buys.

But here’s the trap. When distributors order employee hats, they often default to the cheapest unit cost. The result is a hat the employee technically owns but doesn’t actually wear off the clock. It comes off the moment the shift ends. The brand impression ends with it.

The shift in thinking that matters: an employee’s hat is a recruiting and retention tool as much as a uniform piece. Staff who genuinely enjoy the gear they’re handed wear it on weekends, post photos in it, hand extras to friends. Staff who don’t enjoy it leave it in the truck. The cost difference between a hat someone wears once and a hat they wear for two years is usually a few dollars per unit. The marketing return is not close.

Practical guidance: invest in fit, structure, and decoration quality on employee headwear specifically. This is the audience where “premium” pays back fastest, because they’re the ones putting in the wear hours.

Audience Two: Retail Accounts

Hats for retail accounts (bar owners, store managers, beverage directors, the buyers and gatekeepers who control your shelf space and tap handles) operate by a completely different set of rules. These aren’t uniform pieces. They’re relationship currency.

A retail account hat needs to do something a uniform hat doesn’t: it needs to look good enough that a bar manager would wear it on his day off, when he isn’t representing anyone. If it reads as a freebie, it goes in the same drawer as everyone else’s freebies. If it reads as something he’d have bought, it goes on his head.

This is where co-branding gets tricky and where most distributors leave value on the table. The instinct is to put your logo on the front, big. The better instinct is usually to think about the hat the way the wearer will: what does it say about him to wear it? A subtle distributor mark with a great supplier logo, or a co-branded design that ties to a specific local market, often outperforms a giant distributor logo by a wide margin. That outperformance shows up both in wear rate and in the relational signal it sends (“we made you something cool” vs. “we want you advertising for us”).

Practical guidance: for retail account gifts, design for the wearer’s identity, not yours. The marketing happens because they wear it, not because your logo is large.

Audience Three: Consumers at Events

Festival activations, sponsored tailgates, brand launches at retail, charity events: distributors are increasingly running consumer-facing moments, and headwear is one of the most-requested giveaways at any of them.

The math here is different from the first two audiences. A consumer at an event has no relationship with the distributor and probably doesn’t know what a distributor is. They want a hat because hats are useful, fun, and free. The question isn’t whether they’ll take it. It’s whether they’ll wear it home.

What works at events: hats that feel tied to the moment. A design that references the specific event, the specific market, or the specific season, something that functions as a souvenir as much as a brand asset, gets worn more often and longer than a generic logo cap. The consumer is essentially trading closet space for the memory of being there. Make the trade worth it.

What doesn’t work: ordering the same SKU you give your drivers and handing it out at a music festival. The driver hat is built for a uniform context. The festival hat is competing against everything else in that consumer’s life.

Practical guidance: build event-specific designs, even in small runs. The cost per hat goes up; the wear rate goes up faster.

The Program Question

Once you separate the three audiences, the program design question gets simpler. You’re not trying to find the one hat that does everything. You’re building a portfolio.

A useful starting framework:

Employee tier: higher unit investment, fewer designs, durability and fit prioritized, ordered in larger quantities with longer cycles.

Retail account tier: moderate-to-high unit investment, more design variety, often co-branded with suppliers or tied to specific markets, refreshed more frequently to keep them feeling current.

Event tier: moderate unit investment, design tied to the specific activation, ordered in event-sized runs, treated as part of the event budget rather than the merch budget.

The distributors who run programs this way tend to spend roughly the same total dollars they were spending before. They just stop spending them on hats nobody wears. The shift is allocation, not budget.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The single biggest predictor of whether a headwear program delivers marketing value isn’t the unit cost or the embellishment technique or the supplier relationship. It’s whether someone, somewhere in the organization, asked the right question before the order went in: who specifically is wearing this, and why would they choose to?

When that question gets answered honestly for each audience separately, the program works. When it gets skipped, when one SKU gets ordered to “cover everything,” that’s when the box ends up in the back office.

A hat is one of the few marketing assets you produce that has to earn its impressions one wearer at a time. The good news is that distributors who treat it that way tend to find it’s also one of the most efficient marketing dollars they spend. The hat does the work, but only if the program is built to let it.

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Lisa Shrigley is Director of Marketing at Branded Bills, a custom headwear company producing 3 million+ hats annually for 1,000+ brand partners. The company got its start a decade ago making hats for the founder’s brewery and has since worked with both NBWA distributor members and breweries large and small, including Constellation Brands.