Etsy Seller Interview with Donnie & Mandy of PGHatCo

How PGHatCo got started

Introduce your Etsy shop and tell us your story. How did you begin and decide on what to sell on Etsy, and how do you create your products?

We are the PG Hat Company. Formerly known as Patriot Graphix (this is where the PG comes from), We started selling on Etsy way back in 2012, long before making hats. I was only doing vinyl stickers at the time as a side hustle while working at an engineering firm. At the time, it was just something fun to do. Our son was born in 2012 and our daughter in 2015. While our Etsy shop was doing great... Vinyl stickers are so time-consuming to pick and weed. We ran our shop from 2012 until 2017. We decided to turn it off, and we shifted over to trying to be the best parents we could be while I devoted more time to my "grown-up job,” as I called it.

For a year or two leading up to our next chapter, I kept telling my wife, "Mandy," that I knew if I went all in on Patriot Graphix, it would be better for our family and we could have the freedom to do whatever we wanted.

In 2018, I decided to go all in on our business that had still been growing outside of Etsy through our website and local businesses. We were still doing vinyl work on a larger scale, doing business windows, vehicle applications, websites, and a lot of shirts for events, schools, and even the Blue Angels. During this time, I found a love and passion for leather and leather patch hats after a visit to Key West, FL, and finding an awesome hat from a small store. I was determined to find a way to make them. They started to blow up with an offroad company that I helped brand into a multi-million dollar company through stickers and now apparel.

After 18 years in a professional office environment, I was now working in our spare bedroom with bedroom slippers on. Shortly after, Mandy had the itch to work again since I could take and pick up the kids from school and the business was running smoothly. She had been a stay-at-home mom for six years. She worked for a Fortune 500 company that was rated in the top 10 places to work in the country. In 2020, during COVID, she was sent home to work. Due to the sensitive information she worked with, she had to take over my spare bedroom office. I moved into our dining room and worked on our dining room table. Like most Americans, we were losing our minds trying to work at home and now be teachers for our kids at home.

One night, I had an idea to relaunch our Etsy shop with custom leather patch hats. It was a hit. I was desperate to have our dining room back, so I moved everything into our 2-car garage. We upgraded our equipment and made our first big purchase of a “Glowforge Pro” laser engraver, which now engraved and cut all of our leather patches vs. by hand, which I had been doing.

Then the supply chain hit, but I had been watching a trend of hats being in very low stock. So we started loading up and ended up having over 4,000 hats on racks in our garage shop. Our Etsy shop took off! We even had to buy a second Glowforge to keep up with the work. It was like having two employees working for me. By the end of 2020, I was getting up at 8 a.m. and working in the garage until 1 a.m., 2 a.m., and 3 a.m.I told Mandy I needed her badly, so she quit her job right before Christmas, and at that moment, we were a legit “home business”.

As we began to grow into a hat business, our name, Patriot Graphix, became confusing to our customers. So we abbreviated and launched the PG Hat Company. The story doesn’t stop there.

We were now designing and having our own hats made with our labels inside the hat, making them officially our brand. This was huge for us. But the next huge step was when we signed a lease on our first 800-square-foot space to work in, which moved us out of the hot and cold Florida garage.

We also needed to get bigger equipment. Our Glowforge lasers were great, but we were beyond a hobbyist level at this point, so we purchased a mammoth industrial laser machine for our new location. We absolutely killed it from June 2022 through June 2023. So much so that we outgrew that space.

In June 2023, we signed a new lease on an 1800-square-foot retail space that has a showroom twice the size of our garage, office space, and a massive warehouse to store our now 10k+ hats, equipment, shipping supplies, and more.

In August 2023, we officially opened our very first retail store where customers can come in and build their own hat, buy our hats with our logos and branding, t-shirts, and now cowboy hats and team hats. We have expanded even further and have an exclusive account with Mitchell & Ness that has been around since the early 1900’s. We now sell throwback NBA, MLB, and NCAA team hats in our store for a full shopping experience, embedding ourselves in the local community as the only hat store like this.

We have taken great pride in our journey since 2008 and love to share our story with customers that walk in and those online. We have built our brand on family and faith. And I will always stand behind these two things.

Favorite items

What are your favorite items? What makes these so special? Why do you think these items might be selling well?

I really love our wedding party hats. Knowing that the products we are making are making one of the most important moments in someone's life even more special We feel like we are part of their special day, and the memories in their photos with our hats will be around for generations to come.

These sell so well, especially during the spring and fall months. Our customers also purchase them as guys trip, girls trip, bachelor and bachelorette hats and really get fun with some of the ideas we see.

Getting sales on Etsy

How long did it take for you to earn your first sale and how do you currently attract customers to your Etsy shop?

When we were only making stickers, it took a little while to generate sales. I think because stickers are so broad. But when we relaunched our hats, sales were immediate the same day. I take a lot of pride in our appearance, so I have always tried to make our photos and listing details stand out amongst the rest. That is how we really try to attract customers to our shop. Visually.

We have seen other shops copy and paste our listing details and wording and change it to be for them. Our logo has been copied nearly identically across photo styles, and even the little “customise” circle on our main photo has been mimicked over the years. It is a frustrating battle to navigate your way through all the other similar shops, but it gets more frustrating when you see others trying to replicate the appearance that has made us... But we have just grown to learn that the old phrase “imitation is the greatest flattery” is true. We just stay in our lane and keep focusing on us, our customers, and our products.

Managing PGHatCo

How do you manage your shop? Are you running solo or do you have any team members? What tools or services do you use to run your shop and how do you handle fulfillment?

We are the only ones that manage our Etsy shop through the Etsy Seller App and the website. We use the shipping function through Etsy to print our labels. Sometimes we use UPS to ship larger orders, so we have to do that outside of Etsy but add the tracking to our customer details on the order side.

Generally, I print the packing slips for our order book, then hand everything off to Mandy for shipping, packing, and even a handwritten note on every single order.

The future of PGHatCo

What goals do you have for your shop in the future?

A goal of ours that we have had for quite some time is faster turnaround times. While I think we still have great production times for a custom product, we know customers want their items fast. We call it the Amazon mentality, meaning that Amazon has put expectations in people's heads (including ours) that we expect things in a matter of days.

But the reality is, with the type of volume we produce, we still work as fast as we can. It isn’t always just one hat in an order. It is mostly 12, 24, and over 100 times. We try to be as transparent as we can with our customers in terms of timelines. If anyone ever needs something by a specific date, we will do what we can to accommodate that.

We never want to sacrifice the quality of our hats because we rush an order. Nothing leaves our shop unless it looks perfect.

Advice for new sellers

What’s your advice for a new seller starting an Etsy shop?

Be patient. Nothing is built overnight. Try to create your own vibe to make your shop stand out. Don’t look at other shops success and try to replicate that shop. Look at the success of other shops and use that as your own motivation to be that successful, but with your own vision.

I had that problem with wondering why this shop had this many sales or that many reviews several years ago. It was discouraging and made me think I wasn’t doing my best. But in the end, I realised I was putting more emotional energy into worrying about other shops when I could be putting that energy into our own shop and just keeping my blinders on. I said it earlier, but “staying in your lane” is the most important thing you can do when we live in a “compare yourself to others” world.