T. H. HYNDMAN

owner and designer

NICE HAT COMPANY

Nessy, The Loch Ness Monster Hat

spotted in Scotland.

     I started the Nice Hat Company in1993 with $40 and some scrap fabric. Two years later I realized I wasn't just making funky wearable art; I was  in fact competing in the garment industry - doing all the  manufacturing myself at home. As an artist sculptor, I like to say, a sewing machine is just another power tool. So I upgraded from home to industrial machines that was great and much more productive.

     At the time, 95% of my hats where sold to ski shops. I was doing wholesale trade shows and got some reps.  Demand was great, and I needed help. I found a local subcontractor to cut and sew  most of the hats. I went to the factory once a week to  lay out fabric, draw in the marker for cutting, and oversee production. The most popular styles where the cute animal hats, even though I liked the wild and outrageous abstract ones with artistic bobbles. Money and numbers don't lie, at least in my books, so more and more animal hats came into the "HAT O LOG'' every year.

     Everything was going great.  Everybody on skis wanted a "nice hat".   I also thought these animal hats would be great on kids even if the kids weren't on skis, so I did wholesale kids shows and boutique shows. And I was very lucky I did.  About 50% of my business came from outside the ski industry.  When a Kennedy and Sonny Bono died on the ski slops within weeks of each other, the next year ski shops bought helmets not hats and many domestic companies and manufacturers, large and small, went out of business that year. I lost 90% of my ski business.

     I survived and focused on the specialty boutique market and museum gift shops (Museum of Natural History, American Museum of Folk Art, etc.) things were good. I started two new lines - Skull Cap and Tommy Art things were looking up! Still, I couldn't land the really big accounts, my prices where too high for the big chains. They all came in my booth at the New York boutique shows, but my hats would never sell if you marked them up three or four times. I started to see department store knock-offs of my designs, which made me mad & laugh. They could have bought my whole company and all the designs for less than half of  the salary paid to the employee with the digital camera and the photo attachment in his or hers email to a factory some were in China. It was junk! In fact, it was so bad because of cheap fleece and bad redesign I only lost a few customers.

     Be that as it may, I knew I had to do some thing. I had known for a long time that the only thing I had to sell was my designs and patterns, and my customers had to be willing to pay extra for the higher cost of local production. I had to cut cost or be ripped off and die. I had been designing a non-competing hat and glove line for Grandoe Corporation a large glove company that has been doing business for over a hundred years and owned a factory in China. Over the years they had little success with hats and had no pre-existing market in fleece hats, gloves and accessories. I licensed Grandoe the names and designs of my companies, Nice Hat Company for specialty boutiques and Tommy Art for large department stores. I oversaw all lines, fabric choices, labeling, patterning, samples etc. they were able to cut my wholesale price by more than half and with my instructions, the quality was great.

    In the first year they sold over 100,000 units and a million dollars in sales. Plus I had more time with my son and to make art, of course I only made  a small percent of the million. I brought home the same amount of money as before licensing, but with a lot less work. for a few years it worked out great! Then Grandoe started to lose interest an stopped pushing sales, so I canceled my contacts and took my companies back. Just as my wife decided we should move to Scotland. Fair Isle in the Shetlands. I'm still looking to license my designs maybe to a European company? We'll see. For now. I'm going  old school, back to sewing every thing myself. I will have industrial machines on Fair Isle. Electricity is produced by wind mills, so my new slogan will be...

When the wind is blowin' I'm a sewin'

Peace, love & a sense of adventure

Tommy H. Hyndman

Octopus Hat

Penguin Deluxe Hat

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Top Dog Hat

T. H. HYNDMAN

COMING SOON

skull cap tm

design by

T. H. HYNDMAN

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prices $18 - $28 US

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