Family’s Cap Business Is a Hat Trick

When ABC zoomed in for a close-up of 1991 Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard during the nationally televised Michigan-Florida State game this fall, Eric Davis almost tackled his television set.

“There’s the best player in football, wearing our bicycle cap,” said Davis, one of three brothers who own Kappit, a custom manufacturer in La Verne that sells to the University of Michigan and about 500 other college bookstores nationwide. Last year, their annual sales were about $400,000.

The Davis brothers--Eric, 29, Muir, 31, and Carl, 35--are part of a close-knit La Verne family, and their ties to sewing go way back.

Carl says his earliest childhood recollection is of listening to the Dodgers on the radio while his mother hooked a rug. Muir remembers taking his mother’s sewing machine apart and putting it back together when he was 9.

The operating rule around the Davis household was that you not only had to fend for yourself, but also mend for yourself. In grammar school, the brothers were cutting out patterns and by junior high, they were making their own three-piece suits. “I wore mine to my junior prom,” Eric said.

“I made my own tuxedo for the senior prom,” countered Carl in a game of one-upmanship that’s been going on as long as any of them can remember.

The brothers, along with sister Sarah, now 33, also sewed, stenciled and air-brushed their T-shirts and patched their jeans. “That isn’t to say we enjoyed it,” Eric said. “Sears had these tough-skin jeans that I could have died for.”

When their mother, Dorothy, quit her teaching job to go to the University of La Verne Law School, the four also had to learn to cook, clean and do their own laundry. Their father, Rodney, was busy working as a psychologist.

“We’d come home and say, ‘Mom, what’s for dinner?’, and she’d say, ‘Whatever you fix,’ ” Muir said. “We just learned to use our hands.”

All graduates of Bonita High School in La Verne, Carl earned a degree in art and physical education at the University of La Verne, Muir majored in math and business at UC Berkeley and Cal Poly Pomona and Eric studied art at Ft. Lewis College in Durango, Colo.

During a 1982 Christmas ski vacation in Vermont, Carl, then working as a computer repair technician, suggested that the brothers go into business making painter’s caps. The three had collected caps from college bookstores, but were often disappointed by the hats’ poor craftsmanship and high prices.

At first, the plan seemed impossible. Muir and Eric were still in school. None of them had capital for such a venture. And to make it work, the trio would have to both master the production process and tame their sibling rivalries.

“If you’d asked me when I was growing up, will I work with this person when I’m 29?” Eric said, looking at Muir, “I’d have said, ‘No way, I want to be on the other end of the country.’ ”

Yet the brothers began working independently to make the perfect painter’s cap, experimenting with elastic headbands and cardboard bindings for the visor. In 1983, after his spring finals, Muir toured the American Advertising & Shop Cap Co., a Hoboken, N.J., firm that had been making painter’s caps for clients like Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams since 1927.

Their parents contributed seed money. They bought three sewing machines, rented a second-floor office in Claremont and set up shop. The plan was for Muir to handle finances, Eric design and Carl production.

By chance, Eric, taking a summer course at Brown University, met the bookstore buyer for Yale University. From that came their first order: 2,000 painter’s caps for the 1983 centennial Harvard-Yale game.

To meet their orders, Muir (who was also UC mascot Oski the Golden Bear that year) had to fly home on weekends from Berkeley to help sew. Meanwhile, Eric was shipping his silk-screen designs to Carl from Colorado.

Next came 1,500 caps for the 1984 Rose Bowl, and Kappit was under way. There still were hitches: The reverberations from their sewing machines began to rattle the nerves of the office tenants below them and Kappit was told to go. They bought a shop on 1st Street in La Verne and moved.

To delay purchases of costly new presses and darkroom equipment, they improvised. Their first dryer for silk-screen fabrics, for example, was a set of jury-rigged coat hangers that fanned out like an accordion.

The days were long, the work hard. By 1986, all three brothers were working full time at Kappit. If they weren’t printing or sewing, they were renovating their shop into a real apparel plant.

“It was just getting to be 16 to 18 and even 20 hours a day, seven days a week,” Muir said. “We started kicking each other out and saying, ‘You’re taking a day off. Leave!’ ”

But there was another dynamic at work. As they began hiring employees, they found their personal attachments with their workers growing. “We were hiring and employing people,” Muir said. “We were teaching people how to sew and how to print and how to do things that they came to us not knowing.”

To stay afloat, they were flexible. When Bonita High School’s cross-country coach wanted something that would stay on his runners’ heads and keep them warm, they shortened the bill of their painter’s caps, added elastic and created what has become known as a bicycle cap.

Their ingenuity started paying off with the appearance of their UCLA bicycle cap on the cover of the 1987 spring edition of the College School Journal, a trade magazine for university bookstore operators.

That fall, they parlayed the media exposure into a spot at the Campus Market Expo in Cincinnati, where they signed up sales representatives to market their hats nationwide.

“These guys were too good to be true,” said Jack Tomlinson, who met them at the trade show and represents their lines in the Midwest. “Their designs and graphics were bold, but the thing I remember most is that they presented this kind of kid-next-door persona that made you want to take ‘em home for a milkshake.”

Back home, the Davis brothers bought the shop next door and now operate printing and sewing shops on a third of an acre. Their seasonal staff goes as high as 20 employees. They manufacture from 5,000 to 50,000 caps a month for sale in bookstores from Stanford to Slippery Rock.

Business, however, has slowed during the current recession. To survive, Kappit is diversifying into custom-order, college clothing lines such as crew caps, hair ties, shorts, sweats and T-shirts.

But they refused when consultants advised them to lower manufacturing costs by sewing their hats first and then printing the designs. The brothers say the designs would have to be 20% smaller to be printed on a finished cap.

Inevitably, a few errors happen. Once, they shipped some Georgia Tech bicycle caps without the “h” in Tech. “That’s one of the wonderful things about the family,” Eric said. “We all share our mistakes, even though that one was actually mine.”

Of more importance is meeting their deadlines to produce bicycle caps for the 1992 Citrus and John Hancock (Sun) bowls, and keeping customers like Dale Arens, a buyer for the University of Iowa athletic department, happy.

“When you buy in volume as I do, it’s just refreshing to deal with guys who remember your name, know what you need and make you laugh,” said Arens, 32, who buys painter’s caps, crew caps and cotton duffel bags from Kappit. “I call a dozen different companies and talk to a dozen different mouth pieces before I get what I want, but with these guys I get what I need with a single phone call.”