Lids

The Lids brand is a known and trusted provider of sports gear and head gear. The company operates out of Indianapolis, Indiana and has more than a thousand retail outlet locations around the US. The corporation was acquired by Hat World in 2011 and this move was one of the reasons of their success.

Their e-commerce website provides a great custom sports hat service called “Custom Lids“. They also offer a lot of several other sports gears such as jerseys, shirts and accessories on their main websites lids.com for US sustomers and lids.ca for Canadian customers. You will find a huge selection of awesome products for sports enthusiasts, whether you are a player or just a sports fan. They have an awesome assortment of sports teams in the MLB, NFL, NBA, etc. Currently though, their custom service is only available for hats. However you can choose between 211 products and styles by several brands such as Flexfit, Headway, New Era, etc.

Lids Custom Hats Styles

Several hat styles are available for customization. This includes shortstop hats, full count, slugger, knit, fan trucker, snapback, stretch fit, visor and also kids caps. Prices will vary depending on the design and location. Expect to spend around $20 – $40 for one custom cap. There is a $25 Digitization Charge on orders under 24 units. You can get a 5-10% discount if you are a club member. Also, watch out for sales and promos as the site constantly gives out discounts from time to time. You can also opt to upload your own artwork but there is a non-refundable setup fee of $25 per image. Digitizing is the process of converting your logo into a file format used by the industrial embroidery machines. The minimum order is currently 12 units. This minimum will vary based on our current production workload.

Lids has a pretty nifty Design Lab. Unlike other design studios, we like that this one is well-built but still easy to use. You can choose from a nice array of graphic images which will be embroidered on your chosen product. Text embroidery is also another option for design. There are additional charges for each custom graphic or text added to the cap, which costs around $7 – $11. The Design Lab also displays an image representation of your custom design and you will be able to change and personalize the colors. Although the image representation looks fine, it displays only the image and not the image on the cap itself.

Production time for orders 12 or less will take 6 business days. Orders more than 12 and wholesale units can take 10-14 business days or more. Shipping costs are $10 for 1-25 units, $15 for 25-100 units and $25 for 101+ units. For shipping to Hawaii and Puerto Rico, an additional 10% will be added to the order amount.

Lids Embroidery Pricing

Base pricing for embroidery on the front of a hat is $9.99. All additional embroidery options and locations are shown below. This pricing does not reflect volume discounts.

• First Area
  $9.99 – the first area is the location of the main design.
• Additional Areas
  $6.00 – Any additional areas that are embroidered after the first area.
• Additional Charges
  Raised Embroidery – $6.00 per side
  Specialty Thread – $6.00 per side

Lids Custom Hats Volume Discounts

With the Lids Volume Discounts you can save up to 70% when you order 355-499 units. New Era products are not available for volume discounts, however, Lids offers free embroidery to best match the savings on this program.

Overall, Lids proves to be a great resource shop for sports enthusiasts and hat lovers. They have a nice selection of products, reasonable pricing and great custom hat service. There are some improvements that can be done but the website and the service still deliver greatly.