Why so many small businesses are selling hats now
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
Your local coffee shop isn't just selling breakfast anymore — it's building a fanbase.
The big picture: The pandemic forced small businesses to get more creative online about reaching customers. The loyalty forged during that period has stuck around and evolved.
- "Businesses that found other ways to reach customers … really saw that as value," Emily LoMenzo Washcovick, podcast host and former small business expert at Yelp, tells Axios.
- The way to win now is "to world-build. Not market or advertise, but world-build," writes Camille Moore, author of the Substack "Branding with Benefits."
State of play: Restaurants, coffee shops and fitness studios aren't just selling their core products anymore. Hats, hoodies and pins are part of the playbook, too.
- They drop merch like streetwear brands, crowdsource ideas from followers and document behind-the-scenes stories on Instagram and TikTok.
- Restaurant merch "is the new band tee," as many have put it.
Case in point: Andrew Dana, co-founder of D.C.-born Call Your Mother, says the bagel shop never had a formal strategy for being funny online. It now has nearly 100,000 Instagram followers, a swag shop selling mugs and "Bichons, Bagels & Vibes" tees, and more than 20 locations across three states.
- "It's always just been authentic," Dana, who founded CYM with his wife Chef Dani Moreira, told Axios. "If you are not authentic, that will stink very quickly."
- For an upcoming Chicago opening, he's even considered hiring a caricature artist instead of a DJ.
Others are leaning into nostalgia. Coffee brand Cafe Aroma started 65 years ago with Cuban immigrants roasting beans on a Harlem stovetop and selling door-to-door. Today, it's stocked at Walmart— and selling hats, espresso cups and vintage-style sweatshirts inspired by archival images.
- "We wanted it for ourselves," Bernadette Gerrity, the brand's vice president and the founders' granddaughter, tells Axios. "Free billboard space."
Some experiment further afield. Detroit-based nonalcoholic beverage brand Casamara Club — now distributed in more than half of U.S. states — pairs product samples with unexpected giveaways, like mini sunscreens during a music festival in Motor City.
- "Here's a little something to remember us by," co-founder Jason LaValla tells Axios.
Reality check: You don't need millions of followers, just the right ones.
- Heyday Canning, a Portland-based bean company, drew crowds in New York by accepting beans as currency at a pop-up pantry in 2023, going "mildly viral" on TikTok, founder and CEO Kat Kavner Woolf tells Axios. People still reach out about that activation years later.
Even unlikely businesses are playing along: A brother-run pest control company in Miami, Florida posts videos of critter removals to a few hundred followers.
- "It's not like they're, this huge, mega viral account," LoMenzo Washcovick says. "But that's a sticky audience."
- For a small business, sticky can beat viral.
