A Branson hat maker now has his own store with all 573 of his leather-patch hats in it.
Big Kong Caps · Apparel and Custom Hats · Ecommerce Build, Headless Shopify, Catalog Migration, Product Customizer, Web Design, Accessibility
Sold Only Through Etsy
Big Kong Caps is a family hat company in Branson, Missouri. The owner designs leather patches, laser-engraves them in-house and puts them on trucker hats, snapbacks and 7-panels. Every sale ran through two Etsy shops and Facebook. He had owned bigkongcaps.com since 2021 with no site on it. A gift buyer who wanted a Papa hat with a birth year, or a business that wanted its logo on a crew's hats, had nowhere to go but a marketplace listing. The owner had no store of his own to send them to.
A Full Store on His Own Shopify
Because buyers already found the hats on Etsy and every listing had real photos, we moved the whole catalog into a store the owner controls instead of building a brochure that links back to Etsy. Each design change also passes a layout check across all 616 pages of the site, on phones and desktops.
- Built the storefront in Next.js on Vercel, with a Shopify account in the owner's name behind it for products, cart and checkout.
- Loaded the full catalog into Shopify through its API: 573 hats in 10 collections with 1145 photos, each hat with its colors and its patch text field.
- Made the text a buyer types for the patch travel with the cart line into Shopify, so the order arrives with the exact words to engrave.
- Built a hat designer that places a leather patch, one of 12 drawings and the buyer's own words on photos of real hats.
- Added a page for business logo hats with a quote form. The site wears a black-and-white look with the owner's gorilla logo, so the hats carry the color.
A Store Ready to Open
The store runs on a preview today while the owner sets up payments and sales tax. A shopper can search the catalog and filter by family, faith, wedding or holiday hats. They can type a year for a Papa patch and read on the same page that the patch is engraved in-house in Branson. The site also shows the shop's Etsy record of 5.0 from 15,322 reviews. When it opens, the owner can point his Etsy and Facebook buyers to a store he owns, where the customer list, the catalog and the checkout are his.
