Interview: How Lexi Mire Found + Keeps Up with Demand for Embroidered Baseball Caps

Lexi Mire is a wed­ding pho­tog­ra­ph­er who has unex­pect­ed­ly cre­at­ed a boom­ing career embroi­der­ing hats with col­or­ful flo­ral designs. Lex­i’s first for­ays into stitch­ing were just meant for her­self until a friend asked her to embroi­der a blank hat. After shar­ing the final prod­uct on social media, it was clear that Lexi had stum­bled into an untapped mar­ket. Now, she cre­ates cus­tom embroi­dered hats that sell out in min­utes on Etsy. (If you want your own, look to her Insta­gram for sale announce­ments or join her mail­ing list!)

I spoke with Lexi about the type of stitch­es she uses and how, amidst all of the enthu­si­asm around her hats, she achieves the elu­sive work/life bal­ance. Scroll down for the inter­view. The accom­pa­ny­ing pho­tos are a peek into her stu­dio and the process it takes to cre­ate a sin­gle hat.

Where did you get the idea to embroi­der hats?

Embroi­der­ing on hats was def­i­nite­ly not my orig­i­nal plan when I start­ed embroi­dery! I start­ed play­ing around with flo­ral embroi­dery one fall when I got a new den­im jack­et and want­ed to make my own patch­es. A good friend of mine named Katie was in love with the embroi­dery in my Insta­gram posts and texted me ask­ing if I would embroi­der on a blank hat for her. She wears a ton of hats and want­ed some­thing fun and fem­i­nine, as opposed to the typ­i­cal sports team logo or text design. I embell­ished the hat for her and when I post­ed a boomerang of it on my Insta­gram my fol­low­ers were STOKED. I end­ed up cre­at­ing more hats for some local art mar­kets and then start­ed build­ing my busi­ness from there.

What types of stitch­es do you use when work­ing on your hats?

My embroi­dery style is pret­ty mod­ern, and I don’t fol­low a lot of the tra­di­tion­al embroi­dery rules. So I make up stitch­es a lot or do vari­a­tions on tra­di­tion­al stitch­es. The ones I play around with most are the back stitch, the split stitch, and the long and short stitch.

Your hats are in high demand! How do you deal with such enthu­si­as­tic inter­est while still get­ting to have a life out­side of stitching?

It is absolute­ly mind blow­ing how high the demand is. It’s def­i­nite­ly been a learn­ing process for me fig­ur­ing out how many hats I can say yes to and where to draw the line. I obvi­ous­ly want to accom­mo­date every­one because I am so flat­tered and hon­ored that so many peo­ple want to own some­thing I cre­at­ed, but I also want to be a well round­ed human being with a social life, healthy rela­tion­ship, and hob­bies. I lim­it myself to a cer­tain num­ber of orders per month now which has been super help­ful for me. The hats sell out almost instant­ly, so it can be a crazy process for a cus­tomer. With that in mind, I have also tried to add more dates to my sched­ule where hats will be avail­able if peo­ple miss out on past sales, and I have also released tees and tote bags as an alter­na­tive if some­one wants to sup­port my busi­ness but haven’t been able to snag a hat yet. I am also plan­ning on releas­ing pat­terns so crafty folks out there can cre­ate a hat of their very own!

What’s sur­prised you the most about embroi­der­ing hats?

The biggest thing that sur­prised me dur­ing this whole adven­ture was dis­cov­er­ing my own tal­ent and abil­i­ties. It sounds sil­ly, but I have been a pho­tog­ra­ph­er my whole adult life, and always felt like it was my one big tal­ent. It has been so mag­i­cal dis­cov­er­ing that I had this whole well of untapped inspi­ra­tion in me that I did­n’t even know about! It has also been so fun delv­ing into the world of fiber arts on Insta­gram. There are so many incred­i­bly skilled artists out there in the world and my feed is just a col­or­ful won­der­land now, rather than just pic­tures of peo­ple’s lunch and cats. Find­ing those cre­ators and real­iz­ing this skill set I have could be my job is some­thing I am so grate­ful for.