Today we’ll get into the second part of our blog series on hat display stand examples. Headwear is a large and growing category within apparel accessories. It’s also a bit crowded so taking the time to think through effective merchandising approaches is a worthwhile exercise. As we stated in our last post, our main objective is just to share a range of different options for displaying headwear. If you missed Part I of this series, you can read it here.
Our first example today is a 60” wide gondola-style mobile merchandiser we designed for Kmart. This fixture was designed to solve the problem of hats becoming disorganized in the store since the caps were merchandised in a way where they just sat on shelves. Customers almost never put them back neatly so the whole section became a merchandising mess. We designed the slotted metal frame shown below to allow for adjustability. The horizontal crossbars fit into the slots on both sides of the fixture, and then the cap pocket rows or knit hooks hung on the crossbars. The fixture was mobile, highly configurable, and adjustable. We added side and header signs with “Hat Central” branding.
Our second example below is timely since the craziness of March Madness is upon us. This 16-pocket hat display stand was designed with an interesting mix of lifestyle and branded graphics along with adjustable wire pockets. It included MDF feet with supporting metal flanges, a metal tube frame, and PVC graphics. It would be easy to convert this to a 32-pocket, 2-sided display and also easy to change the graphics for other events or seasonal promotions.
In continuing the sports theme, we designed this 4-sided, 28-pocket hat display stand for Major League Baseball. We created a metal tube frame and utilized the same type of wire pockets, but on this display, we added a branded vacuum-formed base cover, plastic red backdrop panels, angled mirrors on 2 sides, and a removable header graphic.
We designed another smaller capacity cap display for Major League Baseball which is shown below. This design also used our vertical upright wave structure and featured 8 levels of side-by-side cap pockets. Like the above example, we designed a vacuum-formed base cover with a home plate graphic and added a 3-D vacuumed formed header sign.
Our fifth example is a headwear end cap we designed for Captivating Headgear. We designed this with 6 front-facing shelves, each of which held 4 wire cap pockets. The main structure used MDF with a wood melamine finish. We included an inset area on both sides to merchandise knits, added front mirrors, and finished it with a PVC header sign.
Sixth, we designed the high-capacity knit fixture shown below to merchandise organized knits on 2 sides. We designed the display with a branded MDF base, a metal tube structure with a black slide-in PVC panel, wire knit merchandisers, and a die-cut PVC header sign.
Our seventh example is a mini-tower we designed for Imperial Headwear. We created a branded sheet metal base with a 2-color screen-printed logo. We added a sheet metal back panel, 6 branded sheet metal cap shelves, and an interchangeable PVC header sign.
Eighth, we designed the cap topper shown below to add on to an existing fixture in AutoZone. This all-metal attachment featured a metal tube frame with a clamp-on bracket and short angled pockets only designed to hold 3-4 caps. There was nothing fancy about it, but for AutoZone it was all about incremental revenue since the space above the existing fixture was previously unutilized.
Next, we designed the 2-sided, freestanding mobile knit fixture for Chaos Hats. You can see the wire knit attachment below that we used on this fixture and some of the other examples discussed above. The fixture was constructed of a basic metal tube base and frame, but we included a center PVC panel, a plastic base cover, colorful side signs and a distinctive die-cut PVC header sign.
Our tenth example is a cap topper that you might find on top of a rounder or other type of fixture in a retail store. We’ll actually share 2 examples of a very similar concept. The first is 2-sided and includes 6 branded cap pockets and 4 knit hooks on the other side. This display utilizes a metal tube frame and comes with an interchangeable header sign. The second example below is a 4-pocket cap topper we designed for Travis Matthews. Similar to the first example, the pockets are individually branded and the header sign is interchangeable.
We said we would only share 10 examples, but as a reward for reading this far, we’ll throw in two bonus examples. The first one shown below is a hanging glorifier display we designed for Melin Headwear to go in Lids stores. It has metal hanging brackets and features MDF construction with acrylic 3D logos on the sides, an MDF shelf, a white interior to make the hats pop, and back panel graphics.
Since most of the floor displays we have shared are made of metal, we thought we would end with an example of a wood floor display with 8 cap pockets. We built this out of China birch and used a darker stained base and shelves to create contrast. We added side mirrors and created a slot for an optional header sign.
Jim Hollen is the owner and President of RICH LTD. (www.richltd.com), a 35+ year-old California-based point-of-purchase display, retail store fixture, and merchandising solutions firm which has been named among the Top 50 U.S. POP display companies for 9 consecutive years. A former management consultant with McKinsey & Co. and graduate of Stanford Business School, Jim has served more than 3000 brands and retailers over more than 20 years and has authored nearly 500 blogs and e-Books on a wide range of topics related to POP displays, store fixtures, and retail merchandising.
Jim has been to China more than 50 times and has worked directly with more than 30 factories in Asia across a broad range of material categories, including metal, wood, acrylic, injection molded and vacuum formed plastic, corrugated, glass, LED lighting, digital media player, and more. He also oversees RICH LTD.’s domestic manufacturing operation and has experience manufacturing, sourcing, and importing from numerous Asian countries as well as Vietnam and Mexico.
His experience working with brands and retailers spans more than 25 industries such as food and beverage, apparel, consumer electronics, cosmetics/beauty, sporting goods, automotive, pet, gifts and souvenirs, toys, wine and spirits, home improvement, jewelry, eyewear, footwear, consumer products, mass market retail, specialty retail, convenience stores, and numerous other product/retailer categories.
