In a recent blog entry for men’s fashions I referenced a Men’s Health Magazine article I found from 2001. The article gave statistics about how men viewed themselves from a fashion perspective and what fashion items they hoped to see in the future. One item men agreed would be a great fashion addition was caps, hats and headwear.

Some men love to wear hats to be fashionable - Ashton Kutcher comes to mind - while others wear it to be practical - block out sun, wind and cold - or to hide thinning scalps.

Popular hat styles include the old standby - the baseball cap - the cowboy hat (if you live in Texas like me) or the dressier headwear like the newsboy or messenger caps.

When I attended a men’s market, I discovered some excellent men’s headwear lines including some great newsboy/messenger caps. Which triggered some questions that had no easy answers.

In fact, I started asking everyone I could find this very important question……how do men know what size hat to buy without trying it on? The sales reps could only tell me that most men’s hats sizes come in S, M, L, XL and XXL. OK, so how high is up? What size of head is a small head versus what size of head is an Extra Extra Large house? How does a man who is buying a hat online know that they have a Medium head versus a Large head? Is there a measurement scale somewhere?

My friend Billy explained that his dad used to love the newsboy caps but could never seem to find one to fit him properly unless he personally tried it on. Even then, when he did try it on first, sometimes the hat still didn’t fit quite right. Billy told me his dad had a bunch of hats he couldn’t wear because although he loved the styling, the hats just didn’t fit right.

So how does this work for men who buy hats online?

Since so many people now shop online, how do they buy a hat and know that it will fit their head without trying it on? This seems to be a sticking point with no easy answer.

Health codes can be sticky meaning that e-stores can’t easily sell headwear or other related accessories that have been previously tried on someone’s head. Brick and mortar stores often allow customers to try on hats. Do brick and mortar stores give explicit permission for their customers to try on various accessory items? Maybe. Some brick and mortar stores have a don’t-see-don’t-tell philosophy where they may not officially want their customers to try on hats or similar accessories but they look the other way when it happens.

That is a little harder with e-stores. Especially when a customer tries on a hat and then asks to return it because it “doesn’t fit”. Yeah, that gets a little tricky.

But that still brings me back to the big question. How do men buy hats on-line or through catalogs and know what size to buy?

Stay tuned….I am going to do my best to get an answer. In the meantime…if anyone reading this has answers…please reply or email me at shelton@hairboutique.com.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Men's Hairstyles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.