Behind the scenes of making Bedhead hats

While we launch all new prints this week, we’re already working on next year's Spring and Summer’s prints! Yep! The timeline of your hat is quite the long one!

We thought we'd talk you through the process and show you a little behind the scenes of our hats being made and by whom - it's always nice to know a little bit about the business behind the products you're buying, and we're happy to share.

Way back in winter 2023, we were working out the best prints for the 2024 collection. The trick is to choose something somewhere between classic and trendy that is going to be liked by both parents and kids. We don’t always get it right, but mostly, we do! Our hats are loved by parents because of their UPF50+ excellent protection rating and because kids keep them on heads. And kids keep them on heads because they love our hats! They love the soft, stretchy cotton fabric. They love that they fit well. They love the prints and colours. They love that they can play and enjoy the great outdoors without having the brim flop in their eyes. In short, we make hats that kids WANT to wear. Which makes them hats parents want to buy – because have you ever argued with a toddler about wearing something they’re not keen to wear? It’s exhausting.  

So each season’s prints need to tick a few boxes. We almost always have the same base colours as our core colours which keeps dying to a minimum. This spring and summer, we’ve added prints to our Chambray, Navy, Denim, Baby Blue, Blush, Lilac and Khaki colours. For the prints, we always try to throw in a form of transport, some animals, and of course, flowers! These are always our most popular sellers, so it makes sense to go with what the people want! Then we need to work out which colour for which print to fit in with our collection of colours AND we have to make sure the colours and patterns work nicely enough together. It’s like a beautifully coloured and patterned game of fashion tetris. Prints often look nothing like the original version we purchase! Our designers have great eyes and can see prints as different colours or with small additions/subtractions. Our Bridgette and Dalmation prints this season were vastly different from their originals! 

Once the prints are decided, our factory gets the designs and makes a small print run of the fabric for sample swatches. They’re sent over so we can check the colours in person and once approved, some sample hats are made. We make them in three sizes and use these for our photoshoots. The images are turned into catalogues which are sent to our wholesalers who place their orders in late summer for the next spring! This year, we're showing them off to our retail customers  too - you can find and shop our catalogues here. Once stockists orders are in, we can use these numbers to estimate what numbers we will need for both wholesale and retail. It’s a fun game of maths that our CEO and founder Richelle gets to do and we are all happy to not have that job! 

Once the numbers are worked out, the factory gets its order and that is when the magic happens! Fabric is ordered, dyed, printed, ironed, cut, sewn, ironed again and hats start to take shape. This all happens in a light-filled workshop in the Chinese city of Changzhou, a few hours south of Shanghai. Just like us, the factory is a family owned small business employing mature local men and women incredibly skilled and talented in what they do. It’s a collaboration that began before Bedhead when Richelle worked with them in another job. When Bedhead got too big for Richelle to continue making her hats herself, she turned to Ken and his team to take over. It takes a huge amount of trust to hand that control over to someone else, but Richelle knew it was in safe hands.

This year, Richelle visited the factory and checked on production to ensure the quality met her high standards. It always has and it did again this year! The stretch fabric of our Originals and Swim hats isn’t easy to work with, which makes us appreciate and respect our talented machinists even more!  In the 15+ years Richelle has known the owners, they’ve formed a great relationship, with the factory owners staying with her family on their visits to Australia, and their children referring to Richelle as their “Australian aunty”.

The factory staff are a large mix of mature male and female workers who experience great working conditions. They’re passionate about their job and really great at it, producing beautiful, high-quality products for our customers. Each day, managers and staff work together to prep and cook a huge meal which they eat together as a team, something Richelle has adopted in our fortnightly team meetings. 

Once our hats have been completed and pressed, they are stacked and packaged in poly bags – one per stack of 40-70 pieces, NOT one per hat in order to minimise as much packaging as possible. The bags are then boxed and popped on a container ship and we cross our fingers, toes and eyes that the ocean gods are good to us and don't knock the container off the ship like they did one year to our warehouse shelving! 

All that maths done earlier in the year pays off and allows us to save on shipping as we should have enough stock to last us until our Autumn/Winter collection arrives in March (which, by the way, we photographed last week!). The girls in the warehouse then have another fun game of tetris making the boxes fit while they check off the stock and put it away ready for you guys to snap it up!

And that time is now! Happy shopping!

SHOP THE NEW PRINTS HERE