How DadGang Started

We often get asked how DadGang started and what sparked the idea for launching hats.

So there's three of us. Bart, Ejay, and Grant. Bart is writing this post. We are all dads and we've been in a text thread forever now talking about the dad life. The great things, the not so great things, and everything in-between. You know how as a dad or a parent in general you have those wild days of work, life, lack of sleep, driving the kids to school, sports, and all the other things? 

Well we would always share those stories followed by #DadGang at the end of our texts. If any of us had an especially tough day we'd just say "hey that's DadGang". 

During all this time the term just seemed like something that could be understood by plenty of other dads. So we figured "hey let's make 100 hats and see what happens". This was in May of 2022.

I have been working in apparel and marketing for about 10 years now so I knew some people that know how to make great hats and we hit them up. 

We built a simple website, put together an instagram page, and waited for the 100 hats to show up. Once they got here we just put up some simple posts about them and hoped for the best. 

The 100 hats sold out in less than 36 hours. So we decided to make 300 more. Those 300 sold out in less than a week. No ads or influencers, just dads posting about hats and sharing their stories. Oh and I was packing all of the orders out of our tiny garage. So tiny that not even one car could fit in it. But it was perfect for shipping some hats! 

We thought "hey there might be something here". So we kept making hats and kept selling out. The one thing about building this brand is that we didn't want to just find any old hat and slap a logo on it. We really invested our time and resources into quality over everything. We believe that quality dads deserve a quality product. 

The other big thing for us was that dads on social media always get the 'funny' vibe. We get pages talking about mowing the lawn, new balance shoes, grilling, and dad jokes. Don't get me wrong we love that stuff, but fatherhood is so much more than that. So we wanted to start this brand to highlight everything about being a dad, not just the funny stuff. 

We're still 'small' and growing, but hope to really make this community a place for dads to get together, share their stories, and just build a strong network of people celebrating fatherhood in general. 

Since the launch of those first 100 hats we've sold almost 10,000 hats and have been reinvesting in both marketing and inventory. To this day we barely spend anything on advertising and rarely work with any influencers. It's been a very pure and organic growth. 

If you're just here for the first time thank you for visiting the website. We are excited to keep building this brand with YOU! Without you there is no Dad Gang.