Lids co-founder launches new custom hat venture in Cape Girardeau

From the moment he graduated from Southeast Missouri State University in 1987, Glenn Campbell knew he wanted to start his own business.

He found success with Lids, a now-global headwear retailer he and a friend started in an Indiana shopping mall with a store called Hat World in 1995.

Almost 30 years later, having left Lids in 2019, Campbell is launching a new custom headwear store called Make My Cap in his hometown of Cape Girardeau.

“Our key is we want to have great customer service, we want to have great products and we want to be speedy to market,” Campbell said.

Speedy service

Make My Cap’s website launched April 9. A customer placed an order needing 18 hats for his new business that day.

Campbell’s company had them delivered to him by Friday, April 12.

“Nobody turns hats in three days. Nobody,” he said. “Except us.”

Make My Cap contracted with Cap America based in Fredericktown to actually manufacture headwear.

“It’s good to have them there,” he said. “They’ve got the capacity to do what I need. ... if I’ve got questions, I can contact them.”

Everything besides manufacturing, from graphic design to social media, is done at the company’s 440 S. Mount Auburn Road storefront.

What sets Make My Cap apart from similar companies, Campbell said, is it has no minimum purchase amounts. Customers can order exactly as many hats as they need.

“One hat will cost you more than 12 hats, as far as cost per hat, but if you don’t need 12 ... we do one, we do two, we do three. We do a thousand,” he said.

Online presence

Campbell hatched the idea for Make My Cap a year ago. Although Campbell's Hat World bought competitor Lids from bankruptcy in the mid-2000s and oversaw its growth to more than 1,000 retail locations and more than $1 billion in annual revenue, he was captivated by the idea of an online-focused store.

“That (Lids) was a retail concept. This is an online concept. It’s night and day different,” he said. “... That’s where the world is and we wanted to meet the world where it is, not just brick and mortar.”

So much shopping is done online, he said, and he aimed to reach more consumers that way.

“You know how it is. It’s TikTok, it’s Facebook, it’s Reels, its posts, its pictures. We’ve got to be on top of our social media game and make sure people know who we are,” Campbell said. “It’s different than what it was when I started back in the ’90s.”

The company may even start a podcast to create more online content.

The website will feature numerous photo shoots of customers wearing Make My Cap hats. Campbell said user-generated marketing would be a large part of the company’s marketing.

Numerous businesses, municipalities and school sports teams have already contracted with Make My Cap to create a variety of headwear.

Customers submit logo designs to the Make My Cap website. These are then digitized so they can be legible in person.

“Basically, you have to make every element in the logo big enough for embroidery to look good, like a savvy stitch, so the quality turns out decent,” Make My Cap graphic designer Beth Thorne said.

The company website offers several customization options, with more details to be added in the future. Campbell said he would take customer feedback into account whenever he updates the website.

Cap-tivating customers

Although there are other printing services in the region that customize different items, Make My Caps focuses exclusively on headwear.

“I’m not saying that they can’t do headwear, but all I know is headwear, so we’ll do what we do right,” Campbell said.

Currently, customers can choose from a variety of hats, including baseball caps, visors and bucket hats.

“Anything headwear wise that you can embroider on, we’ll do,” Campbell said. “It happens to be most people wear baseball-style caps, but we can do anything.”

Though the store has been open for just a week, it is already receiving triple-digit orders of hats.

To make his new concept a success, Campbell said it has to pull in customers in Southeast Missouri and beyond. Already, he is receiving orders from numerous places in Illinois and he plans to expand marketing to surrounding states where delivery will be quicker.

Campbell is not concerned about growing Make My Cap into a billion-dollar company right off the bat. He wants to start small and grow from there.

“We’re not going to be that big company where you don’t know who’s doing what. If you want to talk to me, you can talk to me,” he said.

Campbell said Make My Cap is similar to Lids in that he wants to cultivate customer relationships.

“Once you take care of a customer, you’ve got them for life,” he said. “... I want to make people happy through headwear.”

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