Artisan hatter fits cowboys, presidents

By Larry Dreiling

Leonardo da Vinci worked in paint and ink. Michelangelo worked in marble and Donatello worked in bronze. All are considered masters at their art.

Trent Johnson works in beaver and rabbit pelts. He, too, is a master of his art. The art of hat making.

For 11 years, Johnson and his Greeley Hat Works has been producing some of the finest in hats, some custom designed as western wear, others designed for walking the fashion runways of New York.

Still, it's the cowboy hat that has made Johnson his fortune. It's taken him from the barn of a ranch northwest of Greeley, Colo., to the Oval Office of the White House as hatmaker to President Bush.

Greeley Hat Works has a fine history. Beginning in 1909 as the Greeley Shining Parlor, the downtown shoeshine shop added hat sales in 1926, selling top hats and fedoras that were popular at the time.

In the 1960s, as styles changed, it became a place for cowboys to find custom made western hats. It went through a succession of owners, too, until Johnson's predecessor, Susie Orr, moved the store from downtown Greeley to her ranch.

The making of a hatter

Nearly 15 years ago, Johnson, a Pueblo, Colo., native who was then a student at the University of Northern Colorado, took a job as a ranch hand to make a little extra money.

"I was a day laborer there. We just got along real well," Johnson recalls as he sits in a barber chair that is a focal point of his new factory and showroom in southeast Greeley. "Pretty soon, I was living in their house with them. Later, they built a home for me on the west edge of their ranch. I was going to college and helping them run their ranch.

"In my spare time, I spent in the hat shop that was in a barn on their ranch. I was sweeping floors and the like. In the spring, you'd be pulling calves and working on hats. In summer, you'd fix a hat and then move irrigation pipe. That's what the job was."

Johnson apprenticed under Orr for three and a half years while he earned a degree in education. He then purchased the business and moved it back to two small storefronts in downtown Greeley.

"It'll be 11 years this January since I've owned it," Johnson said. "In the grand scheme of a 98-year old company is just a little while. We moved to this new space in July.

"Honestly, I've been truly blessed being able to find something I truly love to do.

Blessed--and destined

Maybe even destined, he said, because of something happened to Johnson when he and his wife, Melissa, took their kids to Florida and Epcot Center over the last summer.

"I was maybe 12 years old when Epcot opened and we went as a family that year. I had saved my allowance for that vacation and in every country there, I bought a hat. Not a ball cap, but a hat.

"In Morocco I bought a fez. In France, I bought a beret. I bought a pith helmet in some African country. I collected hats as a kid. Some kids collect baseball cards or Hot Wheels. I collected hats. That's not normal, but I've come full circle, I guess. Who'd ever thought that Trent Johnson would be owning a hat company?"

While the western hat is still the priority for Johnson's business, other people with interests in hats have given him new commissions.

"Last March, Nashville designer Manuel (Who put Elvis in those flashy jumpsuits when he wowed them in Vegas and turned Johnny Cash into the "Man in Black.") came up with a new line of clothes and commissioned me to design and make the hats to go with them," Johnson said. "I was in New York City earlier this year and my hats went down the runway right behind designs by Ralph Lauren and right before Calvin Klein's.

"I guess I've been doing more fashion-forward hats for high-end boutiques across the country, but I still work the livestock shows. I've worked horse shows to runways. I'm not prejudiced. Cattle and horse people are still my core customer base, but I'll build anybody a hat."

Customer service a key

Not only will Johnson and his crew make anyone a hat. They'll offer what they think is top-notch customer service, as well.

"Customer service is the ace up my sleeve. The biggest thing is listening to people. We live in such a big box store world anymore with a blank mark mentality," Johnson said. "People here in this store are all very knowledgeable and personable. They're good listeners who know the product. We put people at ease."

He offers this example of what sometimes happens in educating a client.

"A guy comes in with a picture of some guy wearing a hat he's clipped from a magazine. He wants that guy's hat. I may have to explain to him that because of the way he's built or his facial features another hat may look better.

"The thing is, not everyone's hat has to look like George Strait's or Toby Keith's--which in the case of Toby Keith is a good thing. There's not much fashion to those cheap, imported straw hats of his.

"If that's the case, then every one of the ranchers who read this is sitting on a gold mine because they all have at least one crummy, beat up, old straw hat. They ought to get together and send all their hats to New York. They'd make a million dollars."

Hitting its stride

It was in 1997 that Greeley Hat Works began to hit a new stride, Johnson said, when the National Cattlemen's Beef Association commissioned him to make hat commemorating NCBA's 100th anniversary.

"I was all over that. Usually, something like that goes to one of the big boys. You know, Brand X," Johnson said. "I showed them what I could do and I got the gig of building 100 100-percent beaver hats for their 100-year anniversary. They sold out immediately.

"Now I do it every year. I seem to have developed a cowboy cult following I guess. One year, I attended an NCBA summer conference and my hats that I had shipped in were stuck somewhere else due to a UPS strike.

"Red Steagall, whom I've built hats for, comes over and sits at my booth for, like, three hours, showing people the hat I made for him so I could write orders. How cool is that." Ranchers are the kind of people he really likes working for.

"They are honest, salt of the Earth, good people. It's the kind of show where people could take something out of the booth, tell me they'll give me their credit card number when they get home and you know you won't get ripped off. That's what makes my job so much fun. The niches I've targeted allows me to do what I love and pick who I work for.

"The fashion stuff is fun, but that's not where I intend to make my living. I'm really out of my element there. Cattle people are just good, honest, people and that's who I love working for."

The President's hatmaker

In 2002, NCBA held its convention in Denver. President George W. Bush was scheduled to keynote. So NCBA commissioned Johnson to make a champagne colored pure beaver hat with a solid 14-carat gold buckle set on the hatband for the president as a gift.

Now, about the President. What's his hat size and is his head shape a round oval or a peanut?

Johnson won't say.

"If I said George W. Bush has a big hat size, people would say he's full of himself," Johnson said. "If I said he had a small hat size, they'd say he hasn't got any brains. So I'm not going there."

Johnson said he was left speechless when Bush ordered a second hat for his second inauguration. And when his father, former President George H. W. Bush, ordered one, he was floored.

"We would never have imagined that we would be invited to the White House, but it was with both great pride and humility that we went to the Oval Office to present President Bush with his second hat.

"The leather sweatband made this hat truly unique. It was hand carved by Andy Stevens of Stevens Saddlery. Also included was a hand carved leather photo album tastefully displaying photographs of the hat being created. To top it all off, the hat was presented in a custom carrying case with an engraved plaque with the hat's date of creation."

Bush likes Johnson's hats so much he's been authorized under contract with the State Department to use the presidential seal and the president's signature in hats Bush gives to foreign dignitaries.

"I just did one for the vice president of Sudan," Johnson said. "He was visiting the White House recently so I was commissioned to make a hat for him."

Off-the-rack sales, too

While Johnson and his crew make a lot of custom hats, they also make "off-the-rack" hats that are sold in 40 stores in the U.S. as well as retailers in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia and Japan.

"These production hats are still handmade," Johnson said. "There's a lot of time spent on the custom hats, but we likely spend more time on these production hats than any other hat maker."

"Our current turnaround time is three months," Johnson said. "But when your hat is complete and it's shaped and perfectly fitted, you have a work of art that you will be proud to wear."

Greeley Hat Works not only makes custom hats and sells quality production models, but also can perform a renovation on that old favorite that may have seen better days.

"Guys don't get rid of that hats, so we tell them that we can fix that old friend of theirs, but they eventually had better come in and get themselves a new hat, too."

Larry Dreiling can be reached by phone at 785-628-1117 or by e-mail at ldreiling@aol.com.

Date: 12/27/06

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