AMHERST — Those with an affinity for sports ballcaps from yesteryear might want to check out the special hat room at Mass Vintage’s new retail store Boltwood Walk at the former Knights of Columbus Quigley Hall.

The 420 cubbies that line the wall of this room, located in renovated space that used to serve as the hall’s former kitchen, each hold one cap, many featuring the logos and colors of professional sports teams.

Co-owner Dan Williams says the hats are priced depending on their rarity and popularity. Some of these are National Football League “splash” or “shark tooth” caps, designs that players and coaches wore on the sidelines in the 1980s and 1990s. Others are “script” caps that NFL and National Basketball Association players donned on draft days.

The vintage snapback hats are one of the main attractions for Mass Vintage customers, so much so that after five years of selling them online through an Instagram account — first out of his home in Leominster and then from a warehouse at his father’s office — Williams decided to open a retail store not far from the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts.

A continued growth in the popularity and the interest in the products, with 30,000 Mass Vintage followers on social media, has allowed Williams to become intimately involved in what he describes as an underground hat world and subculture that has brought him to thrift stores, flea markets and tag sales throughout the region, building relationships with wholesalers, as well.

So successful has the enterprise been that Williams, who earned a degree in animal science from UMass in 2016, abandoned pursuit of a postgraduate degree in dairy science at the University of New Hampshire in 2017 and brought on his fiance, Maddison Dyment, a fellow 2016 UMass graduate, as a business partner.

“I decided I wanted to do this full time. I could run with this,” Williams said, who at the time was living in Dover, New Hampshire.

The next step in the evolution of the business took place earlier this month when Williams and Dyment, along with his brother Matt, who graduated UMass in the spring, and Lewis, their English black Labrador retriever, opened the retail store next to the Lit nightclub.

They spent time this summer preparing the building for the store, putting carpeting over the tile floor, painting the walls maroon and creating a “tag tree” at the entrance that is made from the manufacturers’ tags and thrift store tags.

“Having people walk in, it’s very jaw-dropping for them,” Williams said. “They haven’t seen anything like this in a decade or more.”

Even with more than 1,000 shirts, jackets and sweatshirts on the floor, divided into sections based on sports, music, movies and outdoors, it’s the ballcaps and their nostalgia that are the specialty.

Williams said he has been into the “one-size-fits-all” snapback hats for as long as he can remember, recalling filling up his home and his father’s office with them.

“We know more about hats than anything,” Williams said.

While the store also has an extensive supply of caps for the local professional teams, the Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics, as well as for UMass, Williams said his customers are often looking for different logos and colors of those and other teams.

“We’ve found that other teams are also doing great,” Williams said.

Being located next to Lit has its advantages, as student customers stop in to pick up a cap that goes with the ensemble they are wearing that evening, Williams says.

While the store has bargain bins and racks, with three for $30 items, price points are often $20 and above. One of the rarer caps sells for $200 and features a New York Islanders hockey team alternate logo unveiled in 1995, which he calls a sought-after style.

“Everyone loves the fisherman,” Williams said

The racks of clothing feature brand names, such as Starter, Nike, Adidas, North Face, LL Bean, Patagonia, Polo, Tommy Hilfiger and Reebok, and range from T-shirts and sweatshirts to lightweight jackets and replica jerseys. Among these items are ones with the original Apple computer logo, depictions of NBA superstar Michael Jordan, Pokemon characters and the music group Spice Girls.

Dyment said the clothing is appropriate for all genders.

“You can get nice clothing like new but doesn’t have the tag on it,” Dyment said, observing that one UMass student stopped in to get a vintage sweatshirt with a long defunct logo no longer available at the campus store.

What Williams also sees his business as being sustainable, which means he looks for items that might otherwise end up in a landfill or incinerator.

“We feel that the best clothes were made in the past, and it is a bonus that being able to offer them to our customers is also great for the planet,” Williams said. “We’re recycling, we’re upcycling.”

For the hats, Williams said he loves the hunt to find items and the process of getting them into sellable condition. That can sometimes mean removing sweat stains and cleaning them using toothbrushes.

“We specialize in this because people don’t want to wash and reshape them on their own,” Williams said. “We fix them up and reshape them by hand.”

About 75 percent of the customers so far have been college students who already follow the online store on Instagram. But Williams said he believes there are products for people of all ages.

The store is also buying and trading items, with an effort to get 100 new pieces on the sales floor each day.

During football season, Williams said the store will have NFL games on a big-screen television Sunday afternoons.

While Williams understands that any business in Amherst has to be successful in what amounts to a seven-month season, he hopes that he is catering to interests of the town’s population.

“I think we have something for everyone,” Williams said.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.]]>