Hat, apparel and leather goods brand Sandlot Goods has been a local KC favorite since its founding 10 years ago, but its popularity skyrocketed when Taylor Swift was spotted wearing a New Heights podcast-branded cap at Coachella this spring.
The green hat was brand merch for Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast and was made by Ohio-based sports apparel brand Homage (the podcast’s official merchandise partner), who Sandlot also has a partnership with. Within the first few hours after Swift’s cap debut, Homage received more than 3,000 online presale orders for the hat, and Sandlot Goods was tasked with making thousands of caps in just weeks to fulfill the immediate demand.
Sandlot Goods began primarily as a small leather goods company, with about four people making leather journals, wallets, coasters and belts. In 2020, when the pandemic hit, the company pivoted and began making masks. Over the next few years, they made over half a million masks for local and national corporations and first responders.
After the company swelled to accommodate demand, they realized they had the skill right here in Kansas City to sew more goods and pivoted to baseball caps.
Today, in addition to making hats in their Southwest Boulevard workshop for the Kelce brothers’ podcast, Sandlot Goods is also a licensee for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, making all of the vintage-style hats honoring the former Negro Leagues teams. They also make hats for local teams, like KC Current, and two dozen collegiate teams including KU, K-State and Mizzou.
“We are one of the few domestic hat makers,” says Garret Prather, Sandlot’s vice president of strategic partnerships. “Ninety-nine percent of the hats that you see on the street are going to be made overseas. More and more consumers are looking for that high-quality product that’s USA-made. It’s somewhat relatable to the whole farm-to-table movement. People want to understand where and how their products are made. So for us to be able to hire people in Kansas City to sew and pay them a living wage with benefits—it really goes against the grain of where manufacturing is today, especially with large-scale factories overseas.”
Prather credits Sandlot’s success to its emphasis on quality and its classic style that harkens back to a more basic, vintage aesthetic featuring only one or two colors and a simple logo.
“We’re not just trying to design a hat for men, and then women have to kind of settle for what are the three least-worst designs that they might like,” Prather says. “We focus on the shape of our dad hat to accommodate women’s head sizes and have them more in mind overall. We’re finding people still love vintage wear. So we have modern hats, but they have a vintage feel to them. That’s another thing that continues to gain popularity, like ’90s snapbacks, so we will continue to focus on that.”
Sandlot’s flagship store is at 11530 Ash St., Leawood. Sandlot’s products can be found in various shops in the KC area and online at sandlotgoods.com.
