Melin Headwear

Video details

• Instructor: Golf Life
• Category: Golf Gear

Transcript

Let's meet Brian McDonald from Melon Headwear. Brian, you were telling me the kind of the nexus of your idea to really bring a quality product to the cap market. Yeah. It was rooted in just having seen the level of intention behind every other category: footwear, denim, watches, eyewear. There was plenty of brands out there who had decided to focus in on the category and build a really intentional product. Take a really great running shoe, take a really great loafer for a tuxedo. There was totally different use cases, but a whole lot of intention behind the design, the functionality, the performance. I was a big collector of ball caps. Mm-hmm. Unfortunately, couldn't find one that really seemed like it was made with a lot of intention, and all the caps that I had would fail pretty quickly with one round of golf or one workout or one day on the boat. So the idea for Melon was, could we build a far superior product with technology and performance benefits that the world had never seen, and then associate it with a brand that meant best-in-class for the curated outdoor athlete. And that's a great concept, right? But you got to actually do that, and then you got to get it to the golfer. You were mentioning your materials, the fabrication. You have different designs. You did that from scratch, right? From scratch. There's not one single component. That was the problem with headwear, is that there was the same four or five materials in every headwear factory in the world. The visor core of a Melon hat is an interlaced woven resin that traps air bubbles in its curing process, and it accomplishes a lot. Because of the bubbles in it, it's less dense than water, which creates buoyancy, so our hat will float. It's malleable, and it will not crease. So a lot of hats are made with a cardstock visor inner, and if that thing gets tweaked too bad, it's never coming back. Right. It's now creased. It's smoked. We also worked on an antimicrobial sweatband that kept bacterial buildup from building up on your forehead. We are the first to introduce this laser perforated breathing technique, which has inspired a lot of headwear design, and came up with little things like the little T-slot. The newest feature that I'm excited to kind of debut with you guys is, for years, we had originally built the under visor seal in our products, because if you're picking up a dirty golf ball and adjusting your hat over time, you'll get these grubby finger marks. So we originally built this thumb spot for your thumb to land, to keep the dirty fingers from- Right ... transferring dirt to your visor, and we kept hearing, "Oh, it'd be great if that was a ball marker," so we finally did it. And we'll be building different varieties of cool designs. We'll be blinging out in diamonds some of these things. It'll be really fun. This hat is going to last. Oh, yeah. These are guaranteed for life. Yeah. The value proposition here is you could buy five $20 hats- Exactly ... or buy one Melon- That's right ... that you're going to love and have and use for years and years. That's it. And we actually thought a lot about that renewability. The sustainability aspect of this brand is this hat's going to last you 10 years, 20 years, maybe outlive you. And so you can literally rinse them with hand soap, take any sort of bacteria off of them, and they're brand new again. What's it like for you to have a brand, have an idea, and then be here? I've been doing this 30 years, so I've seen guys come and go. Sure. But it looks like you're here to stay. The hope is that. So it's a childhood dream to be able to build a brand that enabled me to participate in all the things I love to do, travel the world as a part of the journey. My kids always crack me up. They notice every Melon hat in the wild and point them all out. So it's kind of this perpetual gift that you see these strangers out there in your art, in your creation, and you just get to be a little bit grateful every single day. I got to believe if you were to tell a small, because we got 1,900 people with booths in this- Sure ... hall here, and a lot of them are in the apparel area. I would believe that you'd probably be saying to those folks, "Hey, do it right, build it right." Yeah. "And stick to it," right? That's kind of how you pulled it off in today's environment. That's it. I feel like forever apparel's been a really competitive space, and it will forever be a competitive space. The beauty of this industry is if you're building clothing, it's a tribe, it's an identity, it's a uniform for how a consumer wants to be perceived. And if you instill the values into that brand to make that logo fly the values that the consumer wants to be known for, then you've done it. And kill it at your category. Don't try to make everything. You can't be better at me with hats if I'm only focused on hats full-time and you're focused on 17 categories. Bring something special that is better for the consumer, better for the environment, and to your point, just do not give up. Well, you did it in golf, so congratulations. Thank you so much. Thank you for the time today too. That's a wonderful thing, and thank you very much. Thank you, guys.