HAGS Clothing: How “Have A Great Summer” Became a Clothing Brand
What started as a familiar phrase signed in school yearbooks became the inspiration behind HAGS Clothing, a brand built around summer, good times and making memories with friends.
HAGS Clothing started with four words almost everyone has heard before: Have A Great Summer.
I’m Tyler Batliner, the founder of HAGS Clothing, and the original idea behind the brand came from something pretty simple. At the end of every school year, people would pass around yearbooks and write messages to their friends. One of the most common was always “HAGS,” short for “Have A Great Summer.” It was something people wrote without thinking much about it, but I always liked what it represented.
Summer meant being done with school, spending time with friends, going to the lake, traveling, being outside and making memories. There was a certain feeling that came with the last day of school and knowing the entire summer was ahead of you. I thought that feeling could become something bigger. That was the beginning of HAGS Clothing.
Turning a Familiar Phrase Into a Brand
When I started HAGS, I didn’t want to create another clothing company that was just a logo printed on a shirt. I wanted the name itself to mean something.
“Have A Great Summer” already had that built in. People recognized the phrase, understood the abbreviation and associated it with a positive time in their lives. The idea was to take that feeling and turn it into something people could actually wear.
I started HAGS while attending the University of Missouri. Like most new businesses, it didn’t begin with a huge team, warehouse or complicated business plan. It started with an idea, some designs and a willingness to figure things out as I went.
Before HAGS, I had also spent years creating content on social media through TheRealTbat. That experience helped me understand how people interact with content online and gave me an audience to introduce the brand to. But I quickly learned that building a social media audience and building a clothing company are two completely different things.
Someone watching a video costs them nothing. Convincing that same person to spend their money on a product you created requires trust.
That was one of the first major lessons HAGS taught me.
What HAGS Clothing Offers
Today, HAGS Clothing offers apparel and accessories including graphic T-shirts, hats and other casual clothing. The products have changed a lot since I started, but I still want everything HAGS makes to connect back to what the name originally stood for.
HAGS is supposed to be clothing you can throw on when you’re heading to the lake, going out with friends, traveling, watching a game or just enjoying a weekend. That’s also why the brand has naturally expanded into college and gameday apparel.
College life and summer have more in common than people might initially think. Both are associated with experiences people remember long after they’re over. For me, that connection became especially clear while attending Mizzou.
The memories people make in college aren’t limited to classrooms. They come from Saturdays with friends, football games, tailgates, trips, bars, apartments and the town they called home for four years. That opened another direction for HAGS.
Creating Products People Connect With
One of the most important things I’ve learned is that people like products that remind them of something. That could be a place, a group of friends, a school or a specific period of their life.
Our college-town products are a good example. HAGS makes a rope hat with “COMO” across the front, representing Columbia, Missouri. To someone unfamiliar with Columbia, COMO might not mean much. But if you went to Mizzou, lived in Columbia or spent weekends there, you immediately understand it.
It creates a connection without needing a long explanation. We’ve continued developing that idea for college towns across the country. Each place has its own traditions, memories and community.
The same idea goes back to the original meaning of HAGS. “Have A Great Summer” works because people already have memories attached to those words.
Who Does HAGS Make Happy?
HAGS is for people who don’t take themselves too seriously and want to enjoy where they are in life. A lot of our customers are high school and college students, recent graduates and young adults, but the idea isn’t supposed to have an age limit.
Everyone has memories of summer. Maybe it was spending every weekend at the lake. Maybe it was a family vacation. Maybe it was the first summer after graduating. Maybe it was simply staying out late with your friends because nobody had to wake up for school the next morning.
Everyone’s summer looks different, but I think most people understand the feeling HAGS is built around. That’s what I want HAGS to represent.
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Learning to Build a Real Business
One thing I learned pretty quickly is that having a good idea is probably the easiest part of starting a clothing brand. There are products to design, orders to fulfill, customers to help, websites to maintain, content to create and marketing decisions to make.
Not every design works. Not every social media post turns into sales. Sometimes something I think customers will love doesn’t get much attention. Other times, a simple idea performs much better than I expected.
I’ve learned to listen to what customers actually respond to rather than assuming I already know what they want. I’ve also learned how important trust is for an online brand.
When someone finds HAGS for the first time, they don’t know everything happening behind the scenes. They just see a website and a product. Professional product photos, a good website, reliable fulfillment, customer service and outside coverage all help turn HAGS from something someone sees on social media into a brand they feel comfortable purchasing from.
Growing HAGS Without Losing What Started It
HAGS has grown beyond the original summer designs. We’ve moved into college-town apparel, gameday clothing, rope hats and other products that I probably wasn’t thinking about when I first came up with the idea. I want that growth to continue.
But I also don’t want HAGS to become so broad that it loses what made the name interesting in the first place. The original message is still incredibly simple.
Have A Great Summer. Go somewhere. Hang out with your friends. Make memories. Enjoy the time you have.
Clothing trends will change. Social media platforms will change. The products we sell will change. But I don’t think people are going to stop looking forward to summer anytime soon.
That’s what HAGS started with, and no matter how much the brand grows, I want that feeling to always be part of it.
About the Founder
Tyler Batliner is the founder of HAGS Clothing and the creator behind TheRealTbat. He started HAGS while attending the University of Missouri after building an online audience of more than 200,000 followers and generating more than 75 million views through social media content. Check out hagsclothing.com .