NJ Spotlight News
Go-to Newark hat factory for presidential campaign swag
Clip: 10/2/2024 | 4m 14sVideo has Closed Captions
Unionwear has been in business for decades, making hats for competing campaigns
If you’ve seen or worn a hat bearing the name of a major political candidate, there’s a good chance that hat was made by Unionwear at its 70,000 square-foot facility in Newark. Unionwear has been in business for more than three decades, making hats for competing campaigns, some with the most famous slogans, including the now popular Republican red MAGA hat.
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NJ Spotlight News is a local public television program presented by THIRTEEN PBS
NJ Spotlight News
Go-to Newark hat factory for presidential campaign swag
Clip: 10/2/2024 | 4m 14sVideo has Closed Captions
If you’ve seen or worn a hat bearing the name of a major political candidate, there’s a good chance that hat was made by Unionwear at its 70,000 square-foot facility in Newark. Unionwear has been in business for more than three decades, making hats for competing campaigns, some with the most famous slogans, including the now popular Republican red MAGA hat.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipFinally tonight, for the last three decades, workers inside Newark's Union, where factory have had a rare front row seat to the popularity of competing presidential campaigns, churning out hats and other political merchandise for candidates dating back to the Clinton era.
Everybody from McCain and Trump to Obama and Harris, they've done it all.
Raven Santana toured the inside of the hat factory where business is booming.
If you've seen or worn a hat bearing the name of a political candidate, including the president, there is a good chance that hat was made by union wear here at the 70,000 square foot facility in Newark.
We've been in the presidential campaign business since 1992, when we did a small order for Bill Clinton's campaign.
And we've made hats for every Democratic nominee for president.
Nearly every Democratic candidate for the primaries.
And many Republican candidates as well.
And for a number of other politicians running for Senate, governor, Congress, etc.. Mitch Cahn is president of Unionwear, which has been in business for more than three decades, making hats for a competing campaign, some with famous slogans, including that now popular Republican Red hat.
When the Make America Great Again hat first appeared in 2015, when Trump wore it, I believe during a primary, we received a huge amount of orders for that right at the beginning of it.
There was definitely a demand for the hat, and there just was not enough capacity because only a few factories that manufacture domestically, they had wanted the hat to be made domestically.
So we were very heavily involved in that back in 2015.
Cahn says sales at the factory were down at the beginning of the election cycle until Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race.
He says they received another jolt when she announced her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.
He says this camouflage hat with Harris Wolf in bright font is the most popular.
We haven't seen anything like Kamala, really, since Obama, Obama's first term running for president.
We did not see a lot of merchandise for Biden this year.
It was very small amounts of orders.
The last time had seen that was with Hillary in 2016.
The biggest influx that we received of orders was the day after.
Kamala assumes the nomination for president and then the day after was was named to VP.
Khan says these 165 employees behind me are now working around the clock to meet demand.
That, he says, has more than doubled since Harris announced her campaign for presidency.
Khan also credits the boost in sales to his Made in U.S.A. labels.
We manufacture the hats here from scratch.
We order fabric and then we cut and so it into baseball hats.
We normally, in a typical year, doing about 2500 hats a day this year.
During the Kamala campaign, we're manufacturing about 5000 ads per day.
When Kamala stepped in, we had a we had a very short time period to make a lot of hats.
So we've stretched our workers a lot.
They're all working 50, 60 hours a week, working overtime.
And we've moved most of our bag manufacturing into hat manufacturing.
And we also invested in a considerable amount of automation equipment to get this project done.
Cahn says if Kamala wins, they expect a surge in inauguration merchandise, as she would also become the first woman president.
You've got the primaries, you've got presidential candidates.
They're all talking about domestic manufacturing.
That always seems to be, at least for the last 20 years, one of the biggest hot button issues that politicians are talking about.
So everyone who's buying products thinks maybe I should consider buying USA.
So we see a surge during even numbered years because it happens during Winter Olympics and midterm elections also.
And then we see sales generally fall during odd number of years.
For Spotlight News, I'm Raven Santana.
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