I started wearing a trucker hat all the time. Not just any trucker hat. My trucker hat.
Velvet oxblood with a tomato-red embossed logo. The kind of accessory that could belong in a Berlin nightclub or on a Nebraska farm, depending on the tilt of your head and the lighting.
Yes, it's Good Kitty Co. Yes, I'm promoting my brand at all times. Because I love it. Because I want it to succeed. Because I built it with my whole heart.
But here's the twist: the hat has changed me. Or maybe not me, but how the world responds to me.
I've always been outgoing, a little feral, a lot of style. Men never struggled to strike up conversations. Women, though? The velvet rope was always up. A polite smile, a nod, a distance.
Then I put on the hat. Suddenly women approach me. At galas. At gallery openings. In the grocery store.
With a gown, the hat reads as high-style irony. With jeans, it's girl-next-door ease. Either way, women lean in. They start conversations. They open doors I've never seen opened this easily.
What is that about? Maybe it's psychology, a ball cap as an equalizer, leveling a social playing field we pretend doesn't exist.
Maybe it's the cool-girl-at-the-baseball-game effect, softening the edges of whatever intimidation people project onto me.
Maybe it's just breaking the script of what women are supposed to wear to be taken seriously.
Whatever it is, I'm obsessed. I love the sisterhood of side-eye turning into smiles. I love that this velvet oxblood trucker hat is my social crowbar, a bridge instead of a barrier.
And maybe that's what branding really is at its best: not just putting your name on something, but creating an invitation, a signal that holds the door open for someone else to step through.
