Each Tumwater hat is made to order, to the customer’s specifications, as best we can accommodate them. With rare exception, we use vintage grosgrain ribbon, which, like real estate, they just aren’t making any more of. While we have ongoing business relationships with vintage “scouts,” who are remarkably adept at locating caches of old ribbon, when we use up a spool of such ribbon, the likelihood of our finding another exactly like it is quite remote.

So, no two of our hats are quite alike. But they all bear a family resemblance. We make hats in a wide range of sizes but only a few basic styles. We specialize in the hats we prefer to wear ourselves – fedoras with tall, full, relatively straight-sided crowns, the profile commonly seen in films and street scenes dating from the 1920s through the early 1950s. These are the styles we have learned to make, have equipped our shop to make, and like to make.

We like to think that our enthusiasm for classically styled hats shows in our variations on those familiar themes, be it a sober grey hat with a black ribbon or something considerably more whimsical.