Our Story

It started in a mall parking lot

Father’s Day, 2015. My wife told me to take a few hours to myself and do whatever. Our kids were little, my brain was fried, and all I really knew was:

I needed a good trucker hat.

Not a foam party hat. Not a giant billboard for someone else’s logo. I wanted a solid, everyday, patch-on-the-front, wear-it-till-it’s-faded trucker—understated, heritage-leaning, and actually well designed.

I’d been a designer for years, and most hats I saw fell into two camps: fake-vintage trying way too hard, or generic stuff designed by whoever was standing closest to the embroidery machine. Weird type. Bad kerning. Loud for no reason.

So I’m sitting in the Broadway Square Mall parking lot in Tyler, laptop open, and I just decide:

“Fine. I’ll make my own.”

Why “Rose City”?

Tyler’s been called the Rose Capital of the World for over a century. When freezes wiped out the peach orchards in the late 1800s, growers ripped out what wasn’t working and replanted roses instead. Reinvention is kind of in the water here.

“Rose City” was already floating around town, but I liked it for some nerdy design reasons too:

  • ROSE and CITY are both four letters, so they stack clean
  • the old photo-lettering typeface I found had R’s and Y’s too good to pass up
  • it felt classic without pretending to be from some fake year

In that parking lot, I stacked ROSE over CITY, tucked Tyler, Texas underneath, and built a simple patch design with typography doing the heavy lifting.

From one hat to a bunch of heads

Getting from “cool patch art” to “great hat” took a lot of trial and error—digitizing the art, fixing tiny letterforms so they’d embroider clean, testing blanks that didn’t feel cheap, and finding partners who could actually sew patches on straight.

I posted a photo of the first decent hat, and people started asking,

“Hey, how do I get one of those Rose City hats?”

That turned into small runs, a co-branded batch with Pine Cove, and years of side-hustle mode: the simplest website imaginable, a PayPal button, boxes of hats in the house, and me shipping orders between design work, string band gigs, and kids’ soccer games.

The pandemic forced a pause, but the hats wouldn’t quite die. People wore theirs out and kept asking when Rose City Hats were coming back.


The crew & what we stand for

These days, Rose City Apparel is a small team.

We keep it simple and intentional:

  • Design first. Clean type, honest spacing, no stretched fonts or gimmicks.
  • Heritage-grade. Made to age like that old feed store cap you scored thrifting.
  • Utility over noise. Hats and tees meant to be sweated in, tossed on the dash, and worn thin.
  • Texas roots. Born in Tyler—the Rose City—and inspired by the graphic language of East Texas.

Right now it’s a tight line of hats and a classic tee. More will come, but the rule stays the same:

If we wouldn’t wear it on repeat, we don’t make it.