Home Run Apple Beanie Version 4

by Darren Meenan October 31, 2023 0 Comments

After 3 years off, they're back! Version 4 of the Home Run Apple beanie is on deck!

There's a little bit of reading here, but if you're in to this product as much are we, it might be of interest. Thank you for helping make this our best selling product of all time!

The Home Run Apple Beanie might be the most popular winter cap in the history of Major League Baseball. That's really not to brag, but it's pretty crazy that a fun photoshop 10 years ago turned in to such a hit. If there's another one out there that tops the charts, we haven't heard about it yet.

Before we get to the details of the latest release, I just wanted to give some background to how this product came out, and the unexpected success it has had. I designed the beanie about a year before our deal with New Era went through in 2014. I photoshopped some elements together, slapped on a green pom to represent the leaf, wrote HOME RUN across the cuff, and it was done. A simple concept that probably took less than an hour to design. It was pretty wild looking, but any Mets fan instantly knew what it was. After The 7 Line deal was finalized with New Era, and I could start making officially licensed Mets caps, we got to work.

The first batch of Home Run Apple Beanies dropped in November 2015. It was a total crap shoot on how many to order. Eight hundred were produced, and 650 of them sold online in a matter of seconds. The other 150 were held back for our warehouse sale that holiday season. As soon as we opened the doors, those were gone, too. They ended up going for hundreds of dollars on eBay, and still do. Crazy.

Thinking it may have just been a fluke since the Mets were just in the World Series and it was the holiday season, I just did a straight re-order for the spring. I mean, it was going to be warm soon. How many people buy winter beanies in the Spring? Apparently, plenty of people. Those arrived in March of 2016, and those 800 were gone again in just seconds.

For round three, we went HEAVY and produced 3,000. This time the release date was August 7th 2016, and I thought for sure this batch would last a while. At least until the weather cooled off. Citi Field hopped on board and brought in an additional 576 for an in-person sale at their team store. They opened special just for the sale, and people lined up the night before to get their hands on one. Mind you, this was in the middle of a heat wave. All gone. Wild.

Round four was another straight re-order. 3,000 more came in for the holiday season. Gone again. This time instead of seconds, it was minutes. I think around 20 or so.

In the following years, we changed the cap up a little and consistently sold out pallets of them. Each time I thought that maybe this was the time we ordered too many. Thankfully that hasn't been the case yet.

So what's different for Version 4?

We took our favorite elements from the first 3 versions and combined them. This is for sure the last version. There's nothing else to change or tweak. It's perfect.

1) We went back to the original body of the cap. Meaning, the red knit crown and black cuff. Version 3 had a ribbed body. That was ok, but the embroidery didn't pop as great off it as we had expected.

2) Kept the chain stitch Mets and Home Run text embroidery. The HOME RUN thread from the original two versions was ok, but over time that much surface area can tend to fray. Chain stitch gives the thread a much longer life.

3) Nothing against New Era, they're excellent partners and helped take this project off the ground, BUT we felt the white New Era flag logo on the side took away from the HOME RUN embroidery. Since it ends up being so close to the N in RUN, we decided to black that out. Super clean look.

4) Went back to the original stringed pom. The last version had more of a plush pom.

5) Lastly, we kept the color version of our T7L logo on the back. The first version was blacked out, and the second version was replaced with a woven tag.

SET AN ALARM AND GET YOURS ON TUESDAY NOVEMBER 7TH AT 10AM!

YES, SET AN ALARM!