In this video, Scott O'Farrell will show you how he creates custom cowboy hats in his company. By using 30-year-old traditional hand craft method, each cowboy hats of O'Farrell Hat Company has been recognized as one of the best products that is made in the USA.
Here’s a brief process of how custom cowboy hats are made: - Choosing the hat’s color - Measuring the head - Create a template - Order the hat’s body from Tennessee - Iron out the crown - Iron out and sand out the brim - Hand crease the hat - Sew the headband into the hat
Cowboys have deep historical roots dating back to Spain and the earliest European settlers in the Americas. Over the centuries, with differences in topography and climate, as well as the influence of cattle handling traditions from many cultures, they have developed into a distinct culture of its own. Today, cowboy culture is quite popular, and is considered as a subculture that has a profound influence on the aspects of people's choices. Namely entertainment, clothing and consumption of goods, etc. Under that context, the cowboy hat has become a symbol of the American West. A symbol of the spirit of resilience and enterprising nature of the Old West.
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Good morning, I'm Scott Farrell from O'Farrell Hat Company.
We've been in business for, well, since 1979 now.
Family-run business.
My father, Kevin O'Farrell, opened in, yeah, 79 Durango, Colorado.
My father learned how to make hats by traveling down into the south,
mostly Texas, learning from the old-timers there how to do it correctly.
A real custom hat is a hat that the person has designed for themselves,
and we'll help them do that.
Everybody has different tastes, everybody has a different ideal of what a hat is,
and that's what we're here to do.
We're here to help you find the crown, the brim, the color, the material,
and then, of course, it'll be made to your head shape.
So it's the hat you want, it fits you.
That is custom.
Quality hats have always been made from beaver.
The more beaver in the hat, the tighter the felt, the tougher the felt.
Most hats that are made out in the market, mass-produced,
they're going to be rabbit, they're going to be wool.
Appealing because of the price, but something we don't deal with much here
because they're just not made to last.
It's something you wear for a few years, you throw it away.
Beaver felt, we consider a lifetime hat.
Something that's going to outlast you.
We've got many customers that, unfortunately, they've moved on,
we've had to re-block them for their kids, their siblings, whatever.
Because of the quality, we're able to do that.
This is something that's made to last and, again, functions.
So the more beaver, the tighter the felt, the more durable.
There are many different steps that the hat goes through.
It starts off with, of course, the person designing the hat,
picking the brim, the crown, the color, the felt.
To get a proper fit for an old pharaoh, we have a few machines around here,
old machines that are made to get the actual head shape that sits on your head.
We get a template, and further down the process, that template is used,
it's ironed into the hat so it'll fit that person comfortably, fit them properly.
From there, we order a body.
It comes from Tennessee, huge process to make the body.
We get it here, we will iron out the crown, sand the crown
to get that nice finish that a beaver felt comes to.
We do the same process on the brim.
We'll iron it out, sand it out, in that it's all sized to the customer's size.
From there, it's hand-creased.
We have a high-quality sweatband that's sewed into the hat, again, to the customer's size.
And then all the creasing that goes into it to personalize it to the customer's preference.
Quality tradition is very important.
Hat making has been around for a long time.
This is nothing groundbreaking, but again, there's a right way to do it.
We've got many different types of people, working cowboys, people who wear these hats as function,
and that is very important to us.
We don't sell cheap things here, so we want to make sure that it's worthy of the price tag we put on it.
Usual process here in the morning, I'm thinking, well, my hats are too expensive,
and when I leave here in the evening, I'm thinking, man, I've got to charge more for these hats
because a lot of work goes into a good quality hat to, you know, something's going to last you again.
It's, yeah, an investment, but worthy.
