Behind the Campaign: Helping Custom Patch Hats Stand Out in a Crowded Space

When Custom Patch Hats (CPH) partnered with TriMark Digital, they had two needs: stronger organic content and more qualified leads from paid media. TriMark’s job was to make it happen in the ultra-competitive fashion marketing space. We put on our thinking caps and crafted a campaign focused on driving active engagement through visually appealing, highly strategic media. Here’s how we did it.

A Brief Intro to Custom Patch Hats

Custom Patch Hats is a branded headwear and apparel manufacturer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Known primarily for its hand-stitched leather, PVC and fabric patch hats, CPH also offers customizable workwear, athletic wear, winter wear and other apparel.

CPH primarily serves businesses wanting custom-branded apparel for employees or customers. However, the brand specifically does not want to position itself as an impersonal, glue-it-and-send-it branded apparel manufacturer. CPH focuses on craftsmanship, precision and detail in every product. The idea is to create branded items that people actually want to wear, so customers remember CPH as a supplier they can trust.

Setting the Growth Strategy

CPH wanted to drive sales growth and recognized its emphasis on a quality product as a core performance driver.

However, the fashion industry is packed with brands that position quality as a core value, creating competitive paid media and social marketing spaces. If the brand couldn’t stand out uniquely, it wouldn’t compete.

With this in mind, TriMark mapped a marketing approach centered on two big ideas:

Bringing the Brand Closer to the Wearer

Although CPH is mainly a B2B brand, we realized the best approach for our content was to curate a B2C image.

Businesses primarily buy CPH-branded materials, but its customers or employees wear the items. Their satisfaction is what matters most. By creating human-focused content, we could convey that these were quality items for daily use.

To capture that message, we:

• Focused on lifestyle imagery and simple storytelling, showcasing how CPH products fit everyday moments.
• Highlighted CPH’s product creation process, emphasizing the craftsmanship in every piece.

This approach strengthened a more human brand image and made the content more shareable among a broader audience.

Fine-Tuning Paid Media

Our content creation strategy was backed by a flexible paid media strategy. We initially focused on Google and Microsoft search campaigns, and our Q1 results showed considerable performance improvement with the new content:

We knew this couldn’t be a set-it-and-forget-it campaign, given the high variability in the fashion and apparel marketing space. We had to learn, evolve, adjust and follow the data.

While we met our lead generation goals in the first quarter, we also recognized that overspending in less productive channels can challenge profitability. Therefore, we had to recalibrate, expanding in some areas while pulling back in others.

In Q2, we refined our bidding strategies, adjusted our targets and spends, and remained flexible to adapt to evolving search trends. We adapted our content and copy production to align with the latest keywords, conversion data and performance metrics. This maintained a tight, responsive campaign.

The Results: Increased Visibility and Revenue

Our CPH campaign focused on curating relatable content while maintaining visibility in the right channels at the right times. We made it easier for the right people to see and connect with the brand. The outcome was a 15% increase in annual revenue, driven by:

These results exceeded CPH’s initial aims, providing the stability any successful brand needs.