The Harris-Walz camo hat is suddenly 2024’s hottest merch
Plus: A tale of two campaign shops
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
A tale of two campaign shops
The Harris-Walz camo hat is suddenly 2024’s hottest merch
Maine redesigned its old flag and now voters could make it official
Scroll to the end to see: the Harris campaign’s latest camo-themed item 🍺
A tale of two campaign shops
If you want to know the state of play for the presidential race, check the polls. If you want to know the ~vibes~ of the race, or the change in zeitgeist that accompanies shifting political inertia, check the campaigns’ online storefronts. The merch tells a story.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign shop made her running mate public minutes before she did and it’s releasing items at the speed of the internet. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump’s campaign shop has been slow to react, only removing items referencing President Joe Biden some two weeks after he already dropped out. Harris’ shop also shows a deeper bench for the principals. She sells items showing her running mate and spouse, while Trump doesn’t.
When it comes to the change from Biden’s campaign shop becoming Harris’, although the branding is different, the strategy remains the same. It’s mostly branded items and merch showing things like vintage photos and signatures of the candidate and their team, or references to memes. Instead of Dark Brandon canned water, it’s “Childless Cat Lady Club” mugs. The difference is resonance. The enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz camo hat (see section below) is genuine while Dark Brandon never took off the same way.
Trump’s site meanwhile is top-loaded with the latest generation of “Make America Great Again” hats and “Fight” shirts that show an image of Trump with his fist raised after the assassination attempt against him. Trump does have one of the rare policy-themed items of the campaign, a “No Tax on Tips” decal.
Despite grumblings from conservatives about the various demographic-groups-for-Harris Zoom calls that were held in support of her candidacy, Trump’s campaign shop is mostly made up of various demographic group merch. In total, the various “Believers, Black Americans, Latino Americans, gun owners, women, students, veterans and military families for Trump” items make up a 56% majority of the items currently available in the shop.
Material culture has long played a role in U.S. presidential politics from the early days of the Democratic, Whig, and Republican Parties. Campaign merch from log cabin buttons to branded camouflage hats have acted as mementos for supporters.
The main difference today is the internet. It influences what gets made and changes how voters experience politics. Merch is no longer just physical. Weeks before the Harris-Walz camo hat is expected to ship and the real thing arrives in the mail, it’s just a JPEG and a meme.
The Harris-Walz camo hat is suddenly 2024’s hottest merch
The Harris-Walz campaign’s camo hat went from concept to the top of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s head in about 10 hours.
The Harris-Walz camo hat shows the new logo in hunter’s orange over a Realtree camo pattern commonly worn by hunters. The hat is actually a play on a similar design sold by Gen-Z pop star and Midwest native Chappell Roan, which reads “Midwest Princess.”
The callback is spot-on, considering the internet dubbed Walz a “Midwest Princess” in his own right. Following the campaign’s KamalaHQ account going brat green to reference Charli XCX, this is yet another example of how the Harris-Walz design team is able to lean into pop stars and pop culture.
Unsurprisingly, moving fast has proven to be a winning strategy. The campaign’s initial run of 3,000 hats sold out within 30 minutes, according to the campaign. It’s sold nearly $1 million in the Harris-Walz camo hat since launch, the campaign adds.
The Harris-Walz design team came up with the concept yesterday after seeing a video of Walz wearing a camo hat, according to the Harris-Walz campaign. The in-house team designed the hat by around 12:00 pm, and developing prototypes by 1:30 pm, the campaign adds.
Around that same time, Eric Ziminsky, a designer who contributed to Biden’s campaigns, quote tweeted the hat concept in response to a Photoshopped image of Walz’s face on the cover of Roan’s album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
The post took off. Ziminsky’s post (“hear me out…” he wrote) received more than 27,000 likes—an early signal of how popular the hat would become. It is now available for $40 on the campaign website. Supporters will have to wait a while to get their hands on it: the release date is now Sept. 23. The campaign shop shows the hat in multiple patterns and says “patterns may vary.”
Campaigns often use branded camo hats to signal their alignment with voters in rural communities where the hats are worn for actual camouflage and not just a fashion statement. Trump’s campaign has sold camo “Make America Great Again” hats since the 2016 campaign. After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he was leaving the Democratic Party to run as an independent, his campaign shop released a camo hat of its own.
The Harris-Walz hat has extra resonance with the Minnesota governor now on the ticket: a gun owner and hunter, Walz once received A ratings from the NRA and he supports universal background checks. The Harris-Walz campaign adds that the camo hat is a style that Walz himself has worn often.
The Harris campaign has introduced plenty of new merchandise over the last two weeks, from items showing a vintage photo of a handsome, young second gentleman Doug Emhoff to the “Childless Cat Lady” line referencing Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s comments about people without children.
The speed with which the Harris-Walz campaign took the hat from concept to reality is striking. The team added the hats to the campaign store within five hours, and then capitalized on the moment by printing some hats in Philadelphia so that Walz and his family could wear them, according to the Harris-Walz campaign.
While merch alone doesn’t win elections, the Harris-Walz camo hat at least shows how nimble Harris’s campaign is. If something goes viral on the internet, not only do they see it, but they’re ready to react.
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Maine redesigned its old flag and now voters could make it official
When voters in Maine head to the polls in November, they’ll have an important choice to make: whether they should change the design of the state flag.
The proposed redesign by Adam Lemire, a resident of Gardiner, Maine, shows the state’s official tree, the eastern white pine, in the center on a buff field with a navy star in the upper-left corner. It’s his take on a popular state flag design used from 1901 to 1909. Lemire gave the tree 16 branches to represent the state’s 16 counties.
The design was one of 400 submissions Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows received. She said in a statement that Lemire’s submission “stood out as a beautiful, faithful representation of an eastern white pine tree proper.” A bipartisan advisory panel selected 10 finalists, and Lemire’s winning design will now head to a yes-or-no vote. If voters approve it, Maine will have a new flag that Bellows says “honors our past and our future.”
But Lemire also didn’t have much room for creative interpretation. Legislation to redesign the flag was strict about what it could look like. The design brief dictated the flag’s background had to be buff, a pine tree had to be in the center, and a five-pointed star had to be in the upper corner.
In 1909 Maine adopted its current flag depicting the state’s coat of arms on a blue field, which is what vexillologists refer to as a “seal on a bedsheet,” to replace its previous pine tree flag. Overly detailed, seal-on-a-bedsheet flags are now falling out of fashion. Today, states are going for designs that are more likely to be used as symbols of popular expression and identity, as with the distinctive flags of states like Arizona and Texas.
Several states have adopted new flags over the past few years. Mississippi introduced a new flag design in 2020, and more recently Minnesota and Utah ditched their old flags for simpler designs. Simple flags better adhere to the best practices from the North American Vexillological Association, though redesigning them isn’t without controversy. Inevitably, efforts to redesign state flags encounter resistance from opponents, including those who view some changes, like the removal of Confederate emblems, as erasing history. A design issue can then become a political one—and thus a symbol meant to unify becomes divisive.
“For symbols like our state flag to have meaning, they must bring people together—they must unite us,” Republican Rick Bennett, a Maine state senator who helped select the winning design, said in a statement.
In Maine, what’s old could soon be new again. By reviving a historic popular symbol that’s better suited for flag design trends today, Maine is sidestepping the potential for any political landmines.
Have you seen this?
Kamala Harris has already perfected the pantsuit. Now’s her chance to change what power looks like. As America’s first female president, Harris could radically transform what power looks like by using fashion to express femininity and multiculturalism. [Fast Company]
Trump proposed three presidential debates on three different television networks in September. Speaking with reporters from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday, Trump said his campaign has agreed to three debates, to be hosted by Fox News, ABC News and NBC News. [CBS News]
There’s now a $15 Harris-Walz camo koozie. Great for drinking Diet Mtn. Dew.
The Harris-Walz logo is here. The first “Harris for President” branding language was largely used as a way to communicate a sense of continuity in the sudden handoff from Biden to Harris. The new Harris-Walz logo, on the other hand, visually communicates a fresh start. [Yello]
History of political design
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Contemporary button using a vintage illustration of George Washington (undated). The image was used on a Washington’s-birthday-themed postcard that’s part of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection.
Portions of this newsletter were first published in Fast Company.
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Very good post. Reading the quick turnaround between concept to prototype on the camo hat is awesome. Designers continue to be very important for the life of many businesses or in this case, campaigns that want to connect with their supporters. Thanks for sharing!