CALF_News_June_July_2021

24 CALF News • June | July 2021 • www.calfnews.net As he and his uncle talked about the opportunity, Johnson asked what the interest rate would be. “And he says, ‘Well, here’s the interest rate. Every year you owe me money, you have to build me a hat.’” Being hat rich and cash poor, that was a pretty sweet deal. Now he has three-quarters of the money he needs. “So I go to my parents, which I didn’t want to do,” he says. “I remember this like it was yesterday, sliding the business plan across the table and my parents looking at it and whisper- ing.” His parents slid the plan back across the table and said they weren’t going to lend him the money. “I said, ‘I understand, but why?’ They go, ‘Remember when we rented you a lawn mower and when you came home from college, we made you pay rent? We invested every penny you ever paid us in the stock market. So how ‘bout we go down and get your money?’ So that’s how I ended up with Greeley Hat Works.” Johnson says his grades weren’t good enough to get into business school, so he graduated with a degree in sociology and a minor is psych. “I often joke that, at the time, all I knew how to do with my degree was analyze cowboys and hats.” He’s been making a living doing exactly that ever since. His last year as an apprentice, they were building 60 hats a year. The first year he owned the business, he built 120. “I paid off my uncle and I built him two hats in case I ever got in trouble.” He remembers building 350 hats, then 500. “Then I started to expand and actually hire some employees, buy some more equipment because now I was in the business, and people knew me and I could find stuff.” When you’re in the hat business, finding stuff can be a chal- lenge. Almost all the equipment Johnson uses in his shop was built between the 1850s and the 1950s. Greeley Hat Works built a little more than 5,500 hats in 2020. Johnson’s goal for 2021 is to build 25 to 30 hats a day. GREELEY HAT WORKS Continued from page 23 All hats are handmade at Greeley Hat Works on machines that have lots of experience. Here, Trent Johnson sews a hat band into a hat using a sewing machine that dates back to the 1920s. “That’s a lot of hats for a small company.” While that’s a little less than the 14 dozen the popular brands will average in a day, just as that feedyard cowboy learned, there are advantages to buying a custom-made hat. In Johnson’s mind, those advantages are quality and customer service. While all those hats are built one at a time, by hand, and mostly purchased in the same building where they’re made, you can find Greeley Hat Works hats in Western stores. “We build hats for about a hundred Western stores in the U.S. And we have five premier dealers around the United States and one in Canada where you can get fit, measured and order a custom- made hat,” he says. Why buy a custom-made hat? “The main advantage is the fit, the quality of the materials we use and the customer ser- vice. I don’t care if we’re building an entry-level hat for a store or a custom hat for Aaron Rogers, we put the same amount of detail into every hat we build.”  X's AND MORE X's What do all those X's adorning the hat band in your favorite hat mean? Not much, says Trent Johnson, hat- maker and owner of Greeley Hat Works in Greeley, Colo. At one time, they meant a lot. Nowadays, however, because there are no standards or regulations, a hat- maker can put as many X's on a hat band as conscience allows. That’s not to say the X's are meaningless; they can still be a relative measure of a hat’s quality. But one hatmaker’s 5X hat could be another’s 20X hat, Johnson says. Here’s how the X became a mark of a hat’s quality: The Mountain Man era of the American West was made possible by the popularity of beaver hats in the Old World. So to communicate between the New World and the Old World, the biggest, best and most beautiful pelts would be marked with 5 X's on the skin side. A pelt with lower quality fur or one that wasn’t skinned properly and had knife cuts would be graded down. It might earn only 2 X's, he says. “Now, fast forward to 1940, and you’re in the Fort Worth Stock Yards,” Johnson says. “And you go into M.L. Leddy’s [Boots and Saddlery]. You see a hat that has 10 X's in it. At that time, each X was 10 percent beaver and $10. So you could look at that hat, know it’s a 100 percent beaver hat and it’s a hundred bucks.” Somewhere between then and now, the meaning of the X's got lost. That’s why you won’t see any X's in a Greeley Hat Works hat. 