Sold for 430 million yuan! This product is a hit

Compared with luxury goods, "small and beautiful" fashion products are more popular among overseas consumers. Trump once made hats with his manifesto printed on them popular, and a number of sellers received a surge in orders. In fact, the "explosive gold" ability of this single product had been discovered before, and some people made a lot of money.

A hat sold for 430 million yuan , generating revenue of over 100 million yuan

The domestic price of a hat is in the single digits, and some are even sold by the pound by wholesalers. If you sell it across the ocean, how much do you think it can fetch?

If you search for "hats" on Amazon's US site , you will find a variety of hats such as baseball caps, sun hats, woolen hats, and bucket hats. Their prices are mostly between US$9.99 and US$29.9, which means that once a hat goes abroad, its value will increase several times.

The sales of these hats are not low. In the past month, the sales were mostly 5K or 10K, and some popular models even sold 100K.

Although hats are a small product, their market is not small. As early as 2020, the global hat market size reached 30 billion US dollars. Now it has almost become a must-have fashion item in people's daily life. The business opportunities are naturally self-evident.

Love Your Melon , a brand that mainly produces brimless hats, has benefited from the "explosive gold" ability of the hat market and has achieved a revenue of nearly 60 million US dollars (about 430 million RMB).

Unlike ordinary hat brands, Love Your Melon was founded by two American college students in 2012. It is well-known to the public for its concept of "buy one product and donate one product to a child fighting cancer."

The company's hats are made of 100% cotton and are not expensive compared to similar products, ranging from US$20 to US$45. Coupled with the marketing concept of public welfare, the product quickly became popular after it was launched on the market.

Today, the company's product line has expanded from the original brimless hats to scarves, gloves, baseball caps, T-shirts, etc., and is popular in many countries including the United States and Canada.

In fact, there are many Chinese sellers who also make a lot of money by selling hats, especially those sellers who were originally foreign trade factories. They relied on their supply chain advantages to transform into cross-border platforms and caught up with the platform's traffic bonus period.

With monthly sales of over 100,000, it makes a fortune from hats

"Instead of struggling in the foreign trade circle, it is better to transform the platform and attack from a dimensionality reduction perspective." This sentence is increasingly becoming the belief of factory sellers, and many hat sellers are also well aware of this.

Since the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, the number of orders for many foreign trade factories has plummeted, and some factories have even seen their orders drop to zero, and they have to struggle to maintain their business. "We can't find customers, and the large amount of inventory in the factory has to be sold by weight," said a hat seller.

At that time, some sellers began to try to transform online and settled in major cross-border platforms to seek "survival space."

In September 2022, TEMU landed in the US market, and many Chinese sellers also took advantage of the opportunity to settle in and successfully reaped the first wave of dividends, hat sellers being one of them. At that time, TEMU had just been launched in the US, and many people were still hesitant. Mr. Liu, the second generation of the factory, also tried to upload more than a dozen photos of hats.

Unexpectedly, the hats sold out soon after they were launched. In particular, the "pucker hat" with two balls sewn on the top of the head that swayed when walking sold more than 100,000 in November alone. In order to rush the work, the machine at home even smoked.

"A hat sold in traditional foreign trade costs 5 yuan, but I sell it 10 times more through the platform, and consumers will praise it for its quality and low price," said the seller, Mr. Liu, who said that his product gross profit is as high as 40%. After the traffic explosion period, he can also rely on baseball caps to sell more than 10,000 per day on TEMU.

This is not an isolated case. Previously, a SHEIN seller said: "There are more than 700 hats for sale on the platform, and the daily sales are usually several thousand." Sometimes the daily sales can reach more than 30,000. With the hat business, his annual sales on the platform have exceeded 10 million US dollars.

A post-80s seller of hats in Yiwu relied on the hat industry belt and shifted his business from physical stores to cross-border e-commerce. From the end of 2020 to the middle of 2021, he achieved online sales of more than 50 million, and the number of orders also increased from the initial several thousand orders per day to 100,000.

If we delve deeper into foreigners' preferences, we will easily discover that they have a special liking for things that we consider ugly, such as hats with sparkling rhinestones, the words "Mom and Dad" printed on them, and the "pucker hat" that was previously described as "a thing that no Chinese would be willing to wear for a day even if you pay them 200 yuan."

Once the domestic backlog of inventory is transferred abroad, it becomes a hot commodity. Many foreign trade people turn to cross-border e-commerce in this transformation, and make a fortune by relying on the small things they have been deeply involved in.

Big market in the small hat, the “head” has unlimited potential!

China undoubtedly has a high say in the export of hats.

Data from the General Administration of Customs show that China exported 10.453 billion hat products in 2022, of which the United States was the largest market for China's hat exports, with 2.261 billion exports that year, accounting for 21.63% of the total export volume.

Ligezhuang Town in Jiaozhou, Shandong Province, is known as the "hometown of hat making in China". It produces 500 million hats every year, of which one-third of the world's baseball caps come from here. There are more than 600 hat-making companies of all sizes gathered in the area, and 90% of their products are sold to overseas markets such as Europe and the United States through online and offline channels.

In addition, there are many OEM companies dedicated to hat products.

For example, Weili in Zhongshan mainly produces high-end sports caps, and is an OEM for big brands such as NIKE and Adidas; Feida in Shenzhen mainly produces sports and leisure caps, and is an OEM for NBA and MLB; Shanghai Yayuan also mainly produces sports and leisure caps, and is an OEM for Adidas, NIKE, and Puma; Fumei in Nantong produces a full range of caps, and is an OEM for Champion and PVH...

Foreigners are particularly fond of small fashion items such as hats. At present, the main markets for hats in the world are concentrated in Europe, North America and other places.

Take customized pullover hats as an example. Popular elements such as Bohemia, daisy, abstract geometry, and five-pointed stars are very popular. Data shows that the monthly sales of a single SKU of customized pullover hats on Amazon can reach more than 10,000.

On overseas social platforms, netizens rushed to post their orders, which also made Made in China popular. Hats with themes such as Vikings, Zootopia, and blue-green octopus knitted by an old lady have become the atmosphere of overseas families and are sold to more than 30 countries around the world.

Google data shows that searching for the words "baseball cap" and "hats" shows that hats have been very popular. In addition, the search volume for hat products such as "plaid nfl hats", "commando hats" and "mini santa hats" has soared by 4,500%, 1,750% and 950% respectively.

However, it should be noted that hats, as fashion accessories, are highly seasonal, and sellers need to stock them according to fashion trends and time.

hat

Temu

Amazon