Cap America Makes Premium Inroads Into Team Market
Cap America Makes Premium Inroads Into Team Market
With the goal of becoming a one-stop-shop for team dealers, three years ago Cap America identified the blurred line between the team and promotional markets – and the fact that more team dealers were supplementing sales with corporate logoed products and, vice versa, traditional promotional companies were venturing into the team space – and set about to translate its success in the promo headwear market into the team space.
So after experiencing unprecedented growth between 2009 and 2019 in the promotional category, the company is now making inroads into the team sports market with a similar strategy of customer service, free creative work and samples and a line of state-of-the-art headwear.
The excitement around what we do internally, combined with the new CA Premium Line anchored by Flexfit, has been nothing short of outstanding,” explains VP–sales for sporting goods James Matson. He adds that this last piece of the puzzle pulls together in one vendor a large domestic custom knit manufacturer, one of the largest custom overseas importers, domestic three-day production to turn and ship 20,000 embroidered hats each day, and – the fourth jewel in its headwear crown – the Premium Line for the team market. And there is more to come, he adds: “You haven’t seen nothing yet.”
The move into the team market follows Cap America’s successful formula in the promotional market, where it identified the barriers its distributors were having and figuring out how can it make the process more streamlined for them.
“Understanding that headwear was just one piece of a distributor’s promotional arsenal, we decided to make the process painless and simple for them to present the line to their customers,” Matson explains. This included free creative work, no-charge setups and digitizing and, most importantly, free spec samples. “These simple changes to how we offered our product put Cap America on a growth trajectory unmatched in its history,” he adds.
This became a natural direction for Cap America, which then set about translating its proven approach to promotional marketing to team.
“This decision to move into the team space not only provided an opportunity to offer free creative, setups and spec samples that did so well in promo, but also the chance to grow an already formidable line of headwear with premium on-field pieces that had been missing from the Cap America canon,” Matson explains.
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