HAT RETAILERS GET GOOD PRESS

It seems the media is head over heels in love with the art of hat making. Just last week there were two newspaper articles about Seattle- based hat stores. Both stores (Conley and Byrnie Utz) have a hat heritage that envelopes history and humanity. Conley Hats is a specialty hat store owned by Alex Conley. His customers come to buy custom fitted and custom designed headwear (he makes a pattern for each customer). Alex measures his customers’ heads, assesses their personalities and then goes about matching the person with the hat (sort of like a matchmaker only for headwear).

This gentleman has been making hats for over 60 years, so when he talks hat wearers listen. Conley started out shining shoes in a large shop that sold hats (Helman Brothers) and dreams in Chattanooga Tennessee. “In those days men would come into the shop on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday morning to get their shoes shined, their pants pressed, play some “Hi-Score” in the backroom, have a shot of corn whiskey and then go out on the town (on Ninth Street).

“I would help the owner clean up his shop and that’s how I learned to make hats,” said Conley. “I now make women’s hats as well. I learned that from John Eaton. Other stores send people to me with big heads or unusual requests for headwear. I recently made a hat for a five- month- old baby in Atlanta. They wanted an Al Capone hat for him to wear to a wedding. They sent me a picture of the babies head and I measured it from the picture. It was a Mexican family and they wanted the baby to wear the hat in a wedding party. It was made out of black beaver,” said the 71-year-old hatter.

Conley also cleans and blocks about 25 hats a week. He makes hats for people with a penchant for the unique and the off-beat – like orange and purple. He as makes hats for those with large and small heads. “I talk to a person and find out who they are and then I make a hat specially them. For the outgoing person I add a stick pin or a metal strip with decoration on the crown. One woman wanted a hat like the Statue of Liberty. Customers like my approach to matching their personalities with their headwear, and musicians like Pork Pies,” added Conley.

Conley hats are priced from $200 to $450 and according to this life- long hatter, “business has been pretty good.” Conley’s other claim to fame is that he sings opera while he makes hats, hence the nickname, “the Singing Hatter.”

Our hats are off to this man who brings sunshine and dreams to hat lovers around the globe.

If you would like to read both articles we have printed them below:

'Hats Are My Life'
June 7, 2006
By John Sharify

SEATTLE - Get him started talking about hats, and Alex Conley can go on and on.

"People look at you and say 'hey where'd you get a pink hat from?' Because there's no other place they can get a pink hat that I know of," Alex said.

You can get one of those hats at Alex's store in Seattle's Madrona Neighborhood. Swing by, and you'll see for yourself all the different kinds of hats you can buy and Alex can make.

The 71-year-old Seattle man started making hats when he was 10.

He always had the attitude "their wish is my forte". And six decades later, he's still at it.

He longs for the good ol' days when everyone wore hats. If you didn't, you stuck out. Now you stick out if you do.

It's not part of our uniform, which is why: "I'm the only one in town now. And there probably isn't that many of us in America!"

Making hats, pressing them, steaming them, molding them to your head.

"Hats are my life!" he says.

It's an art. Lost? Not completely. Not yet. Not as long as Alex Conley's still around.

Conley Hats is located at 1112 34th Avenue, 206- 322-1868.
Seattle Washington 98122
Website: www.halycon.com/hatter
Email: hatter@halcyon.com

Byrnie Utz Hats	Colorful hats from Byrnie Utz

Retail Notebook: Byrnie Utz is the place for hats
CECELIA GOODNOW

THE WALLS AT Byrnie Utz Hats are lined with the original tiger-oak casework -- mellowed with age and planed to expose the deep grain.

Glass doors display row upon row of high quality fedoras, derbies, cowboy hats, Tyrolean climbers and fine-grained Panamas.

To call this the land that time forgot would not be correct -- not quite. If owners Paul and Bev Ferry hadn't followed the trends -- adding stylish Kangols for young hipsters and a table of hats for the ladies -- they might not be here today.

Still, there's an air of enchantment here, as if a time warp had carried you to a bygone era untouched by piped-in music, faxes, e-mail and the Internet -- none of which have ever darkened the doorstep of Byrnie Utz Hats.

"People often ask how long we've been here," Paul Ferry said, holding forth from behind the counter in his white shirtsleeves, patterned tie and $300 Borsalino Panama hat.

"Well, this is the new store," he deadpanned. "We've only been here since 1934."

The shop's longevity is especially remarkable given the hat industry's near-fatal decline in the mid-20th century. Until then, a sturdy chapeau was as essential to propriety as clean underwear and well-shined shoes.

Like a lot of hat sellers, Ferry blames John Kennedy's bare-headed inauguration in 1961 for putting the industry on life support, even though historic photos show JFK wore a top hat throughout much of the day.

Today, men's hats are slowly regaining ground -- not as a fashion imperative but as a statement of personal style. You see them on rappers, country singers and health-minded men seeking refuge from summer's UV rays.

"Business is certainly better now than it was in the '60s and '70s," Ferry said, adding that growth has been "real slow and gradual."

With some 30,000 hats in stock, Byrnie Utz Hats is arguably the largest men's hat store on the West Coast. At least, Ferry said, "that's what the traveling salesmen tell us."

The shop specializes in Kangols, favored by Samuel L. Jackson, and high-end Borsalinos and Stetsons, though you'll also find lower-priced fashion headwear, but no baseball caps.

"What we carry," Ferry said, "is what you can't find elsewhere."

Ferry, who has worked here since 1975, is as integral to the shop's vintage character as the elegant Stetson hatboxes stacked atop the display cases.

He is also a walking encyclopedia of hat history, brimming with Cliff Claven-type arcana about the early days of bowlers and snap brims and straw boaters -- all delivered fortissimo, with enthusiastic hand gestures and hard-working facial muscles.

He and his wife bought the business in 1990 and now do well enough to support a staff of six -- a threefold increase from their salad days. It's very much a family affair. Son Shawn, 26, is vice president and heir apparent. Shawn's girlfriend works here; so does his brother-in-law, Jeramy Marks, 25.

"When everyone else was living good and investing in Microsoft," Paul Ferry said, "we were investing in the shop. We were able to survive because we were the hat store on the West Coast. Only one man in a thousand wore hats, but they came to me. "

Half their trade comes from out-of-town visitors, who read about the shop in travel books. Local or tourist, the customers span all ages, incomes and fashion cravings.

"We really get a lot of everybody in here," said Shawn Ferry, "from the young kids that are looking for more style to the guys that have been coming in since the '30s and '40s."

Which explains why they don't pipe in music -- customers' tastes are too variable.

The store's best seller is the $120 Stetson Temple popularized by Harrison Ford in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

"It was a hell-of-a-good hat-selling movie," Paul Ferry said wistfully.

Seattle had eight other specialty men's hat stores in 1934 when Byrnie Utz (pronounced yootz) moved his shop from Pike and Second to the current location. Ferry estimates there are 15 to 20 such stores left in the country.

Paradoxically, now that hats are optional, hat enthusiasts have more choices than ever. Brim sizes and crown shapes, once subject to the dictates of fashion, have grown as variable as hemlines. Straw boater, opera hat, Temple fedora or Kangol cap -- anything goes.

"The only rule today," Ferry said, "is, 'Please thyself.' "

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Store address: 310 Union St.- Phone: 206-623-0233