They've Made Hats for McCain and Trump. And Obama and Harris.

One of the last remaining union-run hat factories in the country is in New Jersey. Over more than three decades, its workers have made hats for competing campaigns.


Lately, workers at Unionwear, a hat factory in Newark, have been churning out about 5,000 hats per day for the Harris-Walz campaign.Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

https://archive.ph/FxUVu

By Charles W. McFarlane

Reporting from Newark
Published Sept. 30, 2024Updated Oct. 2, 2024, 11:12 a.m. ET

On an afternoon in September, in a 70,000-square-foot factory in New Jersey, the brims of thousands of camouflage hats were being steamed into a gentle bend so they could be boxed up and shipped across the country.

A large digital display that usually keeps track of how many hats are produced throughout the day had been turned off, because these hats — official merchandise for the Harris-Walz campaign — had been moving down the assembly lines too quickly to count.

“I’ve never seen a surge like this,” Mitch Cahn, the president of Unionwear, a clothing wholesaler in Newark, said as he walked through the labyrinthine factory, where samples and patterns for different bags and caps hang from the ceiling.

Mr. Cahn had been surprised by the popularity of the hats: After Vice President Kamala Harris announced Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate in August, the campaign sold over 50,000 in just a few days. But he hadn’t been caught totally flat-footed.

FULL story at link above. ORIGINAL link below.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/style/unionwear-harris-walz-maga-hats.html