Lids drops a new website for drops

Hypebeasts, listen up: Lids just dropped a new website, just for drops.

The hat retailer will start with one exclusive drop per week, and expects to work its way up to two a week, Lids’ president, Britten Maughan, told Retail Brew.

• It’ll release 40+ products (ranging from $45–$50) online over the next few months.

“We couldn’t drop enough hats to appease the collectors with a brick-and-mortar model,” Maughan said. “If you drop tons of different fashion hats every week, over time you’re going to be left with the smallest sizes, largest sizes, and your store’s going to get muddy real quick. And so we needed an answer for that.”

Hat trick: Finding that answer began all the way back in October 2020, when Lids decided to try the strategy.

“It was obvious that we had lost touch with the headwear collector. We had really gotten to be a lot of core styles in store that were safe and appealed to the masses, which is obviously where the bulk of the dollars are,” Maughan explained. “It’s not a bad thing, and I think we’re capturing a lot more business that way than we previously had, but it came at the expense of the headwear collector who buys hundreds of hats a year.”

As a store-first retailer, that’s where Lids went first: In March 2021, the retailer rolled out one of its initial major drops, a series of custom-made, fitted hats, with a goal of dropping one major release a month. Things quickly took off.

• Lids’ undervisor release last summer, for example, sold out across all of its ~1,100 stores, noted Lawrence Berger, partner and co-founder of Lids’ parent company Ames Watson.

Amid the success, the company was figuring out how to duplicate it online—from collabs, designs (that alone took a year), frequency, and building the website itself, Berger told Retail Brew.

“Lids went from hardly any exclusive product to now, over a quarter of the product in the store is essentially exclusive to us in some way,” Berger said. “This is a way for us to do stuff in a really timely fashion online and engage [customers] on a weekly basis. That’s obviously easier to do online than it is in brick-and-mortar stores.”

The big picture: Success—as with most drops—isn’t just about sales. That’s top of mind for Lids. “It’s far less about revenue, and it’s much more about brand engagement with the customer base,” Maughan said. “We want the customer to be following us on Instagram and email, salivating for the next drop.”—KM