On the 10th floor of a building in New York’s Garment District, above fabric shops that peddle rolls of silk and Spandex, Izumi Kajimoto is looking at a wall of 40 hats that make up her company's current offerings. The designs run the spectrum from straw Panama to cloth newsboy. To Kajimoto's right, dozens of hat boxes are stacked to the ceiling. Across the room are even more hats, vintage pieces that span 150 years and are displayed on individual stands that line the loft's industrial windows. Among them sits the one Kajimoto’s company is known for around the world: the cowboy hat.
Kajimoto is chief executive officer of Stetson Worldwide, the scrappy remainder of a hat kingdom that once served as both a paragon of American manufacturing and the frontier culture represented by such movie stars as John Wayne and Roy Rogers. Those days are long gone: As cattle jobs faded, Western shows vanished, and fashion trends changed, Stetson has struggled to survive. While the privately held company doesn't release revenue numbers, it acknowledges the need to diversify its clientele to stay relevant. Under Kajimoto, who took over in 2012, the company is trying to attract a new kind of customer — more hipster than rancher.
Her plan is to hook young, fashionable buyers by offering an eclectic, trendy mix of hats; everything from nylon boonies to satin-lined trilbys with tattoo designs is now part of the Stetson repertoire. "We're a lot of things that seem to be eclipsed by our overwhelming identity as Western," Kajimoto says across a long, wooden table inside Stetson's modest headquarters. "We must be at the forefront of haberdashery and fashion. I don't want the urban contemporary, city, international guy to think, 'I have nothing in common with Stetson.'"...Stetson was founded in 1865 by John Batterson Stetson, who started
making the company's signature hat out of a small rented space in
Philadelphia. He didn’t invent the tall, brown, wide-brim headpiece, but
Stetson made better ones than his competitors. The right people took
notice. For ranchers and cattlemen, hats were as important as boots and a
saddle, serving as a shield from scorching sun and pouring rain.
Stetson's hardy wares became a necessity and a status symbol among
workmen, says Don Reeves, a curator and chair of cowboy culture at the
National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma. “If you had
this kind of hat, it says: 'I’ve made it.'" By the early 1900s,
the company's Philadelphia plant had grown into the world’s largest hat
factory. At the time, most men wore hats, and Stetson thrived by selling
all kinds of fashionable, everyday chapeaus alongside practical Western
ones. The company endured the Great Depression and both world wars,
when it made thousands of hats for the U.S. military. It then benefited
from the popularity of Western TV shows and movies. “There was a romance
of the Old West that they could play up in advertising,” says Sonya
Abrego, a fashion historian at the Pratt Institute. "It started as
functional and became fashionable." In 1947, sales of Stetson hats
peaked at $29 million, the equivalent of more than $300 million today. Soon
after, the company started to flounder. Fewer people were working as
cowboys and ranchers, and hats went out of style among city dwellers.
Stetson's sales plunged to around $8 million in 1970, a more than 70
percent slide from the company's heyday. A year later, Stetson shut down
production at its Philadelphia factory, later donating the land to the
city and divesting its manufacturing operations. A company called Hatco
now makes Stetson's emblematic cowboy hats at a factory in Garland, Tex.
Stetson has survived as a licensing company. Whereas its bustling
factory once employed more than 5,000 workers, fewer than 10 people,
mostly in the New York office, now oversee Stetson's licenses and
evangelize for the brand...
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