By Corban Bryant
Mockups of some of Purnaa's first sublimated caps
National Hat Day - January 15th
Did you know that January 15th is National Hat Day in the United States? No? Well, we won't hold it against you. In honor of the day, we want to announce a new effort at Purnaa: we're launching sublimated baseball caps!
Sublimated Baseball Caps to Empower Marginalized People
Caps are a fairly new product for Purnaa, but we think they are a vital part of achieving our mission of creating jobs to empower marginalized people to fresh starts and fulfilled lives. Scaling a manufacturing business in Nepal is difficult: it is a small, landlocked, mountainous country with poor industrial and logistics infrastructure; getting most kinds of materials here is challenging, expensive, and requires long lead times; and exporting heavy items out of the country is also expensive. To overcome some of these challenges, we've invested in developing dye-sublimated caps, giving us a product that plays to our technical sewing strengths, but can simplify sourcing in that we can keep white, standardized materials in stock ready to print in any, photo-quality color design or pattern. With printed caps, we can provide our customers with super-fast lead times, low minimum order quantities, competitive pricing, and as always our Fair Trade guarantee.
Launching Caps with Restoration Apparel
To launch this new capability at a substantial scale, we're working with an incredible first customer, Restoration Apparel Company from Kansas City, USA. We met the co-founders, Mike and MJ, from a few years ago and immediately clicked due to our similar mission. They founded Restoration with a goal to provide work opportunities with dignity to people in need, strategically creating employment opportunities for refugees in the US and marginalized people in Haiti, and choosing to work with other social enterprises as much as possible. Mike and MJ were looking for additional production capacity for their growing business of Sublimated Wholesale Sportswear, which was already providing more than 1800 custom units per day to its customers. We suggested they add a sublimated cap to compliment their current sports uniform offering. Despite 2020's upheaval of COVID-19 on their normal business, they jumped at the idea and generously provided a downpayment to cover our initial stock materials investment.
Mike says, "We are super excited about our new partnership with Purnaa. We are delighted to have this unique product in our repertoire. More than that, we are thrilled to utilize our network to bless workers with transformational, life-lifting employment in Nepal. We are thankful for our newfound partnership with Purnaa and look forward to a gathering momentum!"
We hope that together we can provide a unique offering for teams: a fully sublimated uniform paired with a matching cap. With Restoration's in-house art-support, teams can submit a concept and get infinite color and artwork options not limited by traditional decoration techniques of screen printing and embroidery. Together, we'd love to scale our cap offering and create more job opportunities in Nepal.
Do you need a custom team or league uniforms and/or caps? Contact Restoration Apparel here to order today.
Do you need customized caps in large quantities? We'd love to talk with you about how Purnaa's caps can become part of your offering. Contact Purnaa here.
Read More:
Learn more about how dye-sublimation can make a unique business model here: Sublimation Printing: 3 Game Changers for Your Production