Key Takeaways
• Design Flaws & Backlash: New Era’s “Overlap” MLB hats faced significant backlash due to design elements that resulted in gibberish or unintentionally vulgar words, especially in Spanish. This led to the removal of hats from the team’s online store.
• Quality Control Issues: The incident highlights the importance of thorough quality control and having diverse perspectives on design teams to catch potential issues before production.
It’s the latest in a string of “What were they thinking?” moments for Major League Baseball merchandise.
New Era, which typically has its finger on the pulse of what’s hot for branded sports headwear, had a big swing and a miss with its line of “Overlap” MLB hats, which were muddy at best, unintentionally vulgar at worst.
The idea was to keep a team’s normal logo front and center on the six-panel cap, with the team name in the “background.” The problem is that most teams use a letter in their logo, so the designs on the novelty hats just sort of make a new word. Sometimes the words were gibberish like “PhiPies” for the Phillies or “Bobon” for the Red Sox.
Other times, the hat was accidentally vulgar in English (if you use a bit of imagination), but very plainly profane in Spanish, as was the case for the Texas Rangers. The word displayed on the Rangers hat is a vulgar reference to female anatomy in Spanish. ASI Media has elected not to reproduce the word or product image here.
What were they thinking, indeed?
The internet, of course, wasted no time calling New Era out on the mistake.
While New Era didn’t catch the mix-up before the hats were produced, the brand pulled the Rangers hats from the online store.
Lessons To Learn
There’s a lesson here for print and promo products distributors. The first is quality control at every level. If you can spot a design issue that might read as offensive or insensitive, nix it before it goes into production. Obviously, this is where New Era dropped the ball, since the caps already made it to some customers before the internet at large raised a fuss.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, the hats are now novelty/collector’s items – and are selling on sites like eBay for huge sums. For instance, a Rangers cap with the offensive term sold on eBay for $999, after the hats were pulled from the team store.
The other takeaway pertains to forcing a branding choice that just doesn’t work. Even the teams whose hats don’t sport raunchy words en español are pretty silly, and New Era is getting roasted for the design choice. It damages the brand identity for the customer, in this case the Major League Baseball team. In the print and promo worlds, such a mess-up could spell the end of a relationship with a client.
Having multiple sets of eyes on a design or idea allows for a variety of input. There might have been someone on staff who speaks Spanish at least well enough to say, “Whoa, we cannot print that one as is.” Or, perhaps with a little more cooperation and brainstorming, New Era might’ve come up with an idea that didn’t create so many jumbled words and muddled messaging.
Still, maybe we shouldn’t be totally surprised. This flub came from the people that brought you an Oakland A’s cap that had a three-letter foul-mouthed term for one’s derriere emblazoned across it.
There are some silver linings here, perhaps.
I’m sure someone in Arizona named Ariana is excited about the Diamondbacks hat that says “AriAna.” Maybe Ariana Grande can buy the dead stock and sell them at shows in Phoenix for some co-branding.
