| New Era caps was founded in 1920 by German immigrant Ehrhardt Koch. He started the company with 14 employees and was based in Buffalo, New York. The company was originally named E. Koch Cap Co but in 1922 it was changed to the New Era Cap Company. In 1932 the company designed its first ever baseball cap, which was then the beginning of producing its first professional teams baseballs caps, which was the Cleveland Indians home and road caps. At the time, there were no exclusive rights to teams, it was just about winning the deals. Some of their main competitors included Spalding, Wilson and Rawlings to name a few. For some of these companies New Era was producing caps under private labelling. By the 1940’s New Era was producing caps for most of the pro baseball teams. In the late 1940’s New Era produced its adjustable cap but its main focus and focal point was the standard fitted cap. In the mid 1950’s New Era introduced the 59fifty cap, aka ‘Brooklyn style cap’. By the mid 60’s, caps were being supplied to nearly half of the Major League Baseball teams, but in only a decades time they were getting bigger hold and had 20 out of the 24 teams in MLB. In the early 80’s the New Era company had excelled more and along with 23 teams in MLB, they had college sports, local, AAA and International baseball, tennis, golf, and custom orders to. The biggest step in the companies history came when in 1986 they were granted co-exclusive rights to produce caps for all MLB teams and for sale to the general public. This was to be the case up to the end of the 1993 season, after that season New Era was granted full exclusive rights to produce the caps for all the baseball games. |
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