How one old hat maker survives

[hatflick1]

Has this been passed around the Lounge yet?
If not, it makes for an interesting read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/w...to-precise-order-in-spain.html?pagewanted=all

 

[randooch]

Good read, hatflick1. Thanks for posting!

 

[carldelo]

Interesting article - in the same issue of the NYT, there was an article about backlash against hipsters in Montauk, LI, symbolized by this sign:

I guess to some, the fedora does not signify a retro fashion sense or religious devotion, but hipster entitlement. Here's the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/fashion/montauk-feels-the-effects-of-too-many-hipsters.html

 

[H Weinstein]

Interesting NY Times story: Spanish Hats for Brooklyn Orthodox Jews

Just read this interesting story in the NY Times this weekend, about Spanish hatmaker Fernández y Roche supplying black fedoras to Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, NY. With all the economic turmoil in Europe, Roche depends on their narrow but loyal US market for survival these days. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/w...recise-order-in-spain.html?src=me&ref=general

And in case the link doesn't work for anyone, here's the text of the story:

NY Times - August 3, 2012
A Spanish Hat Factory Thrives on Orders From a Finicky Brooklyn
By DOREEN CARVAJAL

SEVILLE, Spain — Since its founding 127 years ago, the Fernández y Roche factory on the edge of this Andalusian capital has weathered every crisis known to hatters.

It surmounted the 1930s “hatless” trend that eschewed fedoras. It survived the sliding popularity of the birettas and saturnos worn by Roman Catholic priests. And, now, it is weathering a decline in Spanish sales of the most elemental symbol of Andalusia, the stiff-brimmed cordobés hat favored by horseback riders and the occasional bullfighter.

But despite the Spanish economic crisis, the hat company is thriving, thanks to an unlikely revenue base: the sales of thousands of black hats each year to Satmar Hasidic Jews in Jerusalem and Brooklyn.

“They are saving us in the crisis,” said Miguel García Gutiérrez, 35, the managing director of the Roche factory, officially known as Industrias Sombrereras Españolas, which operates in an industrial park in Salteras, about nine miles outside Seville. “We have an important market in Spain for traditional hats, but with the crisis those sales have fallen for the last three years, between 20 and 30 percent. But our exports are rising for hats for Orthodox Jews.”

The business is flourishing even though Andalusia’s unique artisans are suffering as demand falls in weak domestic markets. That includes everyone, from third generation artists who make “borlas” — the silken tassels that swing from elaborate religious floats — to families that embroider robes for statues of the Virgin Mary paraded through Seville during the city’s all-important Easter week activities.

The Satmars, one of the largest Hasidic sects with more than 150,000 members, left Hungary and Romania after World War II and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, their main stronghold. There are also communities in Jerusalem and London.

The Spanish factory began supplying hats to the group’s enclaves in Brooklyn in 1980, after an American hat maker shut down and a Brooklyn store, Kova Quality Hatters, started looking for new manufacturers.

Today, the factory still produces traditional monteras for bullfighters, a stable niche market, and plumed, dress military hats made from a collection of more than 2,000 wooden molds. But its growth industry is the basic black felt hat, selling more than 12,500 of them a year — largely purchased by the growing Satmar sect. More than 70 percent of all their hats are exported to the United States, England, Japan, Belgium and Israel.

The hats for the Orthodox Jewish market are not listed in any catalog or Web site. The three popular models make distinctive fashion statements summed up by their names: Bent Up, Snap Brim and the Clergy, which lacks a crease in the crown and is bound around the brim.

“It may seem like they are all very similar black hats, but actually this group has its own fashions,” Mr. García said. “Styles are constantly evolving with a crown that is higher or lower or a brim that is wider or narrower.”

Those barely perceptible differences in plain black hats are important markers, according to Ester Muchawsky-Schnapper, the curator of a popular exhibit that is drawing 800 people a day at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on the lives and customs of Hasidic Jews, including the Satmar sect and their hats.

Some groups wear hats with satin ribbons around the crown that fold into a bow on the right side while others wear it on the left, said Ms. Muchawsky-Schnapper, adding that these differences reflect the choices of the groups’ leaders and members. Brims are a decisive feature.

“You can differentiate the different groups by their hats,” she said, noting that another Hasidic sect, the Lubavitchers, draws meaning from a triangle-shaped crease at the crown, which signifies “wisdom, knowledge and understanding.” The Satmars in Jerusalem wear a very flat hat of rabbit hair, which is more velvety than the Satmar hats in New York, she said.

In the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, Albert Ehrman is the second generation in his family to run the half-century-old Kova Quality Hatters from a brick storefront. He travels each year to southern Spain with his wife, Miriam, to personally inspect the Clergy hats, the most popular with his Satmar clients.

This summer, he spent hours with a small metal ruler, measuring hat brims for uniformity and demanding a “good, sharp edge” for the Clergy, which lately have been narrowing and selling for up to $175 in the United States.

The factory is equipped with rare wooden, antique combing machines that date to the turn of the last century and are used to produce felt made from rabbit, hare and beaver furs. Most of its 40 employees learned their skills at the factory because there are no classes for milliners.

In the summer, when the air is dry, the felt is shaped into crowns and stiffened with a golden resin from India, before being steam-molded into shape. Seamstresses add hatbands, ribbons and labels, some on a vintage Willcox and Gibbs sewing machine.

“We try to take the bugs out of the system,” Mr. Ehrman said, his voice carrying above the factory clatter. “Our customers are much more particular than the people in the factory. The shape should be just right. When they wear the hat, they want it to have a crisp look, not just a soft look like you wear wherever it lands.”

A visit to his store is a rite of passage for generations of families who bring children in when they turn 13 to choose Spanish-made Snap Brims and Clergys, often simply called a “Roche,” shorthand for the company, Fernández y Roche, though by coincidence it also means “head” in Hebrew.

“It’s fascinating to me,” said Simon Yisrael Feuerman, 49, a New Jersey psychotherapist who wears his Snap Brim on Saturdays and is one of three generations of loyal “Roche” customers who shop at Kova.

“The male identity is so profound in the community. A visit to Kova is really the one time that they act with vanity. They keep looking at the hat,” he said. “The differences are crucial once they put on the Roche. Is this brim too big? Does this make me too fat? There is nothing more important than the hat. Nothing. Not even nuclear war.”

What does he think about the ivory lining in his Snap Brim marked with the name of a distant Seville company and the words “Made in Spain”?

“It’s so remote,” he mused. “Nobody thinks about this. People would look at you like you were insane. In people’s minds, it could be straight from Moses.”

 

[The Wiser Hatter]

An a few post's below this one is the same thing.
How-one-old-hat-maker-survives

 

[H Weinstein]

Has this been passed around the Lounge yet?
If not, it makes for an interesting read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/w...to-precise-order-in-spain.html?pagewanted=all

Ooops! I didn't realize you beat me to the draw on posting this NY Times story by a day. Better twice than not at all

 

[oldhat]

Interesting

 

[hatflick1]

It surprise me that Fernandez & Roche doesn't expand its market by creating a few fedora styles. Perhaps with a Spanish flare.
Does anyone from the company belong to the Lounge?

 

[WineGuy]

Interesting article...leave it to the Times to whitewash the fact that the Satmars are the Jewish equivalent to the Taliban. They don't recognize the state of Israel and actively and materially support Hamas, the PLO and other terrorist organizations bent on Israels destruction because of their fanatical belief that with out the coming of the messiah, Israel has no right to exist. The Satmars are also violent, frequently stoning people and cars that they see driving on the Sabbath. I'm glad a family hat business is surviving, I'm curious if any of the more tolerant Hassidic sects are using them as well.

 

[WineGuy]

Isn't it sad that true Fedoras and quality hats are lumped in with the crappy stingy brim $5 Canal Street specials the Hipsters wear. I think we need to put together a FL member road trip to Montauk to show them that real men of character wear Fedoras.

 

[besdor]

Fernandez and Roche hats will be making dress hats for the US market. Stay tuned!!

 

[Grizzly Adams]

Interesting article - in the same issue of the NYT, there was an article about backlash against hipsters in Montauk, LI, symbolized by this sign:

I guess to some, the fedora does not signify a retro fashion sense or religious devotion, but hipster entitlement. ]

So.......just what is a "hipster"? [huh]

 

[winter_joe]

The modern day youth fashion and culture that brought back the fedora in a wrong way...
instead of it being a part of the man, it symbolizes the betterness of a man compared to another man...