During the 2 1/2 years that I worked as a headwear designer at Twins Enterprise, I designed dozens and dozens of new baseball caps. Twins produces caps for all 30 MLB teams and their minor league affiliates, hundreds of colleges and universities, businesses and many athletic arenas. Often we designed for a specific vendor as opposed to designing for a specific team or school. Any cap that we designed needed to be able to be used for any team.

Our main objective was to design caps that would be purchased in addition to Twins’ flagship line, The Franchise. Almost everyone wears a Franchise cap, and we needed to create caps that would make the customer buy additional caps.

Being a fan of “simple” cap design, I was looking for a cap that would appeal to me. The Incognito was the most successful cap that I developed. The embroidered logo on the visor was something that I came up with while trying to modify a previously established cap. Once I figured out that the stitching on the visor was leftover from the old days of making caps, I started to manipulate it. It seems like a simple idea, but I was the first one to do it. Since then, you can see this style of embroidery all over the place, including Reebok’s NBA Championship cap from last year. There is a great deal of pride in knowing that I developed something so successful that other companies were ripping it off.

The Hyde is another example of a simple cap. This was one of three versions of this cap that I developed. Sometimes it had a canvas patch, and sometimes it was a leather patch. Both had silkscreen printing on it. One leather version was in color, while the other had all-black printing (to simulate branding.) The frayed edges on the cap are there to give the cap a “broken in” feel. The leather strap in the back helped to tie the whole cap together. While this version doesn’t show it, the Hyde was one of Twins’ first caps that had an etched logo on the back strap buckle.

The Bubba is an example of a cap that I would never wear. It is a loud, in your face cap. Lots of team colors, lots of logos, lots of everything. There’s no doubt which team you support. I’ve found that this appeals to southern college football. This cap was designed when I was experimenting a lot with mesh. The mesh on this cap is the team’s secondary color (black) and it lies over the team’s primary color (orange). Unlike the other two caps, this is a structured cap with a velcro strap. It’s not a bad style, but it just isn’t for me.

It’s still fun seeing people walking around wearing caps that I designed. And it was a great opportunity to design caps that I would (and do) actually wear.