The short version
Every Places Moments hat starts with a picture I took on a normal day. That picture gets turned into a digital painting, the painting gets turned into a sublimated patch, and the patch gets sewn onto a cap with a stitching color I picked on purpose. The slow part is the back and forth on samples before any of it is final.
The idea starts with just living life
As cheesy as it sounds, the first step is living life. I'm not setting up shots. I just go about the day, and sometimes cool things happen and sometimes I remember to take my camera out. If I do, I take a picture. That's how we end up with the ideas behind the drops.
The other thing that happens in that moment, before any of the manufacturing exists, is that I can already kind of make the whole hat in my head. What colors are we using. What details. What shades of each color. What particular part of the hat should be a specific color. That mental sketch is the thing that gets sent forward, not just the photo.
From photo to painting
The picture goes to get turned into a painting. It's a digital painting, done with a stylus on a tablet, so it's already digitized by the time it lands back in front of me. That part is always exciting, because you don't fully know how it's going to come out. The painting has to read as the place it came from, but it also has to translate cleanly into a patch a few inches across. Some scenes are easier than others.
Why sublimated patches instead of stitched
This is the part people don't usually know. We use sublimated patches, not stitched ones, because stitched patches have a color limit of about 13 different colors. Our pictures are real, so we can't pick and choose how many colors and shades and shadows are in them. A sublimated patch reproduces the painting the way it actually looks: the right gradients, the soft transitions, the small color shifts that make a piece feel like an original instead of a clip-art version of one.
That's why the patches on our caps look the way they do. The painting carries through. It isn't 13 thread colors trying to approximate a sunset.
The sample loop, which is the slow part
Then we get samples made. Two passes, usually. First, digital samples, basically templates of what the hat could look like with the patch on it. I'll tweak colors, details, sizing, positioning. Once I feel sufficiently comfortable with the direction, that's when I have the sample physically made, shipped to my house, and I check it in person. Ask friends for opinions. Maybe make a switch here, a color change there.
So far, most of the hats we've made samples of, we've ended up going with. That's mostly because the digital pass is where the real adjustments happen. By the time a physical sample arrives at the house, the big decisions are already made and what's left is small.
The patch is sewn on, and the stitch color is its own design call
The patch gets sewn onto the cap. I picked sewing instead of a heat-press for a specific reason: when you sew it on, you get to choose the color of the stitching around the patch. That's another design decision people don't always notice consciously, but it's a real one. The border stitch can frame the patch or fade into the crown, and that choice changes how the whole hat reads.
That's why a Côte cap and a Nixon cap don't just have different patches. The stitching around the patch is part of the design.
What surprised me most
Honestly, it was just how hard it is to get something made the way you want it and have your expectations met. When we were manufacturing the first version of these hats two years ago, the amount of bad-quality patches that came back was incredible. You see those bad patches out in the market all the time. It's hard to find a manufacturer who can actually capture the details the way you want them captured.
The shop we ended up going with works because they source everything specifically for the idea. If I say I want this color, this material, this shape, this style, they will go and find someone who can provide what we're looking for, and they'll get it done. That's why our hats end up coming out high quality. You can tell a lot of thought was put behind them when you pick one up.
What this means for the cap you'd actually buy
The reason any of this matters to you, sitting on a product page deciding whether $59 is reasonable for a hat, is that almost every decision behind a Places Moments cap was made by a person looking at it. The picture, the painting, the colors that came through on the patch, the sew-on choice, the stitch color around it. None of it is a default setting on a factory order form.
If you want to see the current designs, that's the newest drops, and the rest is in the full collection. Drops sell out and don't come back, so if there's one a particular design speaks to, don't sleep on it.