HatLaunch was founded in 2018 by Robert Hamm. Robert is a hat lover, car enthusiast and a software engineer by trade. The idea to build HatLaunch came from the desire to produce more income outside of his day job as a side hustle in hopes that he could gerenate enough extra money to afford one day purchasing his dream car, a Lamborghini Gallardo.

Robert knew car people loved hats and after realizing there was not a good option online to buy hats catered to car people he got to work and built the first company website LidLaunch.com. After publishing the website and listing the first items he sold 100 hats in the first week. He knew he was on to something.

The initial hat orders were subbed out to a friend's mom who owned an embroidery shop in St.Louis. He would drive out and pick them up and package and take the hundreds of packages to USPS.

In effors to increase the margins on the hats being sold on the website and improve turn around times, Robert made the decision to buy his first embroidery machine to start doing production in house.

Having the machine and embroidery software at home really helped him learn the craft and become and expert at customizing hats.

Shortly after getting his machine he was getting messages from local business owners asking if he could do hats for them. Then someone placed a 100 hat order! On a single head machine 100 hats would take a very long time... At this time Robert saw the opportunity to shift from making one hat for hundreds of people to making hundreds of hats for hundreds of small business owners.

With this transition it only made sense to take the risk and buy a multihead embroidery machine and move the business to the garage. The larger machine would allow Robert to get larger orders done much quicker so he could also still have time to manage customers and continue to grow the business.

Robert's first child was born the same week the new multihead machine showed up. He not only had to figure out how a new machine operated, he also had to figure out how babies work too :)

Business continued to roll in through word of mouth and a little bit of social media marketing. Robert continued pressing on working nights and weekends while still maintaining his day job as a software engineer.

The Covid Virus outbreak caused Robert's in person position at this day job to transition to being fully remote. This meant he had much more flexibility in operating the business and saving almost 2 hours a day in commuting time. This was huge!

After Robert's wife started helping him complete hat orders while he worked his job, he quickly realized the power of having help producing the orders and immedaitely knew that in order to scale the business he needed to relocate to a commerical location and hire help.

Fortunately, there just so happened to be a small commercial space available a couple miles away from the house. Robert signed a 1 year lease and moved the busienss out of his home and hired his first part time Employees.

Having hired help allowed Robert to focus his time outside of his day job writing code to automate the backend parts of the business to allow handling & processing new customers more automated & scalabale. This was a key turning point in the business.

In late 2020 Robert decided to outsource marketing and the running of ads on Social Media to his now very good friend Andrew Molz @ Monster Agency. Once the ads turned on - the fuel was POURED onto the fire.

When orders started pouring in from ads Robert quickly knew that the current building they were in would not be able to acommodate the next stage of growth. So after only a few short months of being there he found another preoprty to move the business into that was much larger.

More growth - More Equipment - More Machines - More Employees

At the start of 2021 Robert's mom Mary stepped away from helping run the family restaurant to start working at the hat shop. Mom came with years of experience of managing employees and customer service. She quickly got rules in place and workers operating on a set schedule and took the helm of quality control! Nothing gets past mom!

In June of 2021 Robert officially leaves his day job to run the business full time.

The business purchases it's first property and we fully renovate it to be our new production faciltiy.

More growth - More Equipment - More Machines - More Employees (recurring theme)

HatLuanch aqcuires a local screen printing business to start offering high quality apparel to our current customers. ShirtLaunch is born!

What started as a dream that snow balled into a thriving business with 50 employees and tens of thousands of customers - finally resulted in Robert being able to achieve his original goal - Hello Lamborghini Gallardo!

The business doubles essentially overnight. We continue to impliment and develope new custom software to streamline every part of the business processes to facilitate the high volume of orders we are processing.

Love is in the air at the Hat Shop and 6 HatLaunch babies come into the world! For many of our team members it's their first. Someone even had TWINS!

COO - We hire Danny Gifford as the company COO to help build out strong business relationships, leadership and an internal sales team.

CFO - We hire Tyler Smith as the company CFO to maintain all the business's financial responsibilities and help forcast, budget and project our next phases of growth.

For those of you counting this marks the 6th move of the business in less than 6 years! We purchase a 64,000 square foot warehouse to renovate and turn into our new production facility at the end of 2023.

Our current operations are MAXED out at our current production facility and if we want to continue to grow and facilitate our high order volumes, we need a bigger space!

We are extremely close to finishing our new production facility and are VERY excited to move in!