Hat Blog

The Next Annoying Technological Advancement: The Implications of Siri and Apple IPhone 4S

2011-12-13T11:23:28-08:00

It’s all the rage these days to deify Steve Jobs and the inventions he has introduced into our culture. However, let me remind us 1.0 People (roughly speaking, the Baby Boomers), how we felt – how annoying it was - when 2.0 People started having loud mobile phone conversations in public places. Either we grimaced and rolled our eyes (usually unobserved or ignored by these self-absorbed techno-lemmings) or blurted “Shut the F-up”. Our frustration over this abject invasion of people’s privacy didn’t matter, the march of the nerd reductionists just kept coming. Humankind had changed forever. Not only did they not shut up, but we were told to mind our own business.

A few years ago, the ante was upped with the advent of text messaging. The extent to which these children (or child-like adults) were absorbed with (addicted to) their phones increased considerably (witness family gatherings where 2.0ers sit on living room couches simultaneously texting – often to a kid sitting in the same room!). Texting amped up cell phone use considerably. But, perhaps – just perhaps – the silence of typing texts may have served to quiet down the air waves. The obsession with texting may be annoying, but if it reduced the exasperating loud talking in public places, then perhaps this was a move in the right direction.

Well, get ready, because the worst of both worlds is here. Enter Siri. If you don’t know who she is, you will soon enough. Imagine all the text conversations that the Zuckerberg-era sycophants are having. Back and forth with lightning speed they go, right? Now, imagine all that, but spoken instead of written. Now, add the spoken words “period”, “question mark”, “exclamation point”, etc. Imagine no more – that’s Siri. The Apple IPhone 4S includes state-of-the-art voice recognition – Siri is the “intelligent assistant” who you speak aloud with in order to get your search needs met. She’s very good by the way; she understands virtually everything you say. (This challenging technology hurdle appears to have been cleared.) But it’s not the spoken search query that will get you screaming and pulling your hair out. It’s spoken texting, and often with more than one person at a time. Add the fact that punctuation is to be spoken and - if you haven’t yet experienced it - you can well understand how wild and crazy (to put it politely) it is to be around these kids with their Siri.

“Hey dude comma you there question mark chargers are terrible period no chance for playoffs period hi babe period what are you up to question mark hi mom what’s for dinner question mark great comma yum exclamation point no no chance even if they win out period. Sorry to hear that babe period see you after work period ok mom ok dude ok babe”

Thank you Steve Jobs – you genius, you tech guru, you.

Fred Belinsky
www.VillageHatShop.com

VillageHatShop.com – 15th Holiday Season on the Web

2011-11-14T11:17:29-08:00

This Holiday Season marks our 15th consecutive online (32nd overall). Yes, we were here selling on the “World Wide Web” when ecommerce was an infant. Much content from our early days is still at VillageHatShop.com: The Hat Glossary, Hat Facts, Books on Hats, Hats in Art, Iconic Hats, Hats and Children’s Literature, etc. We’ve kept the best of the old as we continue to improve and evolve.

Some National Recognitions During This 15-year Run:

*In December of 1999 TIME Magazine published its very first Online Shopping Guide: “TIME DIGITAL’S pick of the best sites on the Web – to buy the right gift right now.” About 100 sites were mentioned. Only five had pictures accompanying the review; we were one of the five. We of course were pleased to be in the company of Amazon, Land’s End, KMart, Nordstrom, Wal-Mart, Gap, etc. TIME text accompanying a picture of our Viking Helmet: “Village Hat Shop stocks an impressive selection of toppers for him and for her.

*TIME followed up by mentioning us again in December, 2000 - their second Guide to Online Shopping. (By the way, the magazine cover is about Bush vs. Gore, the post-election legal issues. Time flies.] TIME wrote, “Here’s a list of the top web-sites to browse …” and for us, “A wide array of headgear with particular emphasis on Panama hats …..”

*YAHOO INTERNET LIFE liked us also in 1999. In their E-Z Shopper: Smart Buys For Busy People, we were one of a handful of “Picks of the Month”.

*In 2000, we won the national Hat Retailer of the Year award at a ceremony in New York City. In no small part, this honor was bestowed as a result of our pioneering online efforts in the hat industry.

*SHOP ONLINE 1*2*3 Magazine mentioned us in their November/December 1999 issue as one of 250 Great Sites.

We’re not resting on our laurels. We introduced many new brands from around the world in 2011: Signes, City Sport, Wigens, Sinatra, Geoffrey Beene, Woolrich, Ignite, Highland 200. We settled into a new fulfillment facility this year – 5-times the size of our former HQ - and have much more inventory on hand ready to ship within a working day of receipt of your order. Nothing has changed with regard to our status as The Number One Source for Hats Online.

With competition now coming from many non-hat merchants – generalists from backgrounds in books or music, shoe merchants, comparison search engines, auction sites, etc. – we hope it still matters to shoppers that we are doing hats better than anyone else.

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2012.

Fred Belinsky
www.VillageHatShop.com

San Diego Food Bank

In conjunction with our 15^th Online Anniversary, we’ll be donating .15 of every VillageHatShop.com order received between November 15^th and December 25^th to the San Diego Food Bank http://www.sandiegofoodbank.org/donate/. For more on the San Diego Food Bank, see this link: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/sep/01/demand-skyrockets-federal-aide-could-plummet-sd-fo/

The Major Challenge in This Economy

2011-10-28T12:15:32-07:00

Albeit our problems could be worse, this recession has provided us a glimpse of what happens to people when they become desperate by circumstances out of their control. This is not the Great Depression; we are not caught in the throes of war; nor are we victims of a serious natural disaster or epidemic. But, we are showing signs of what can happen to people when their security is threatened.

This is my 32^nd year in retail followed by a decade- the 1970s-in education. Like most everyone else these days, this is not where I expected to be at this point in my life. I am working harder than ever and am under more stress than I can remember. But, this article is not about feeling for ourselves. It’s about keeping our heads on straight in the midst of our efforts to financially survive.

Whether I like my line of work or not (and I usually like it), as a merchant, I’m in the middle of the fray. There’s no escape. As much as I may want to hop on a Harley and head south to Tierra del Fuego, abdicating my responsibility is not an option. Business survival is very important to me. But, survival is not sufficient – and that is my point. The bigger challenge is maintaining one’s integrity - principles, credibility, a positive business culture – in an era when high anxiety is ubiquitous. This environment is new to most Americans, certainly me. This is a test (that we didn’t want to take).

A few test questions for me: Do we keep an employee whose contribution to the business is questionable? [Historically, we have been very careful about firing people. Retraining an employee by identifying an area of the business that is more in line with his/her aptitudes has been our default.] Do we keep a long-time vendor (e.g. business insurance agent, CPA, customs brokerage firm, shipping company) whom we have a meaningful relationship with, or do we shop price? Do we exchange a straight-forward, fair, no nonsense approach to marketing for baloney and flimflam? [Discounting, sales, etc. can be valid incentives, but it is easy for retailers to fall prey to trickery and half-truths.]

This test - for both businesses and individuals - will become more difficult if the economic squeeze worsens. In normal times, it’s easier to opt for the high road. Desperation however appears to be the parent of behaviors that otherwise might never see the light of day. Facing these personal dilemmas in the day-by-day cauldron of tough times and doing the right thing may be the most critical challenge for principled businesses and individuals. I hope we remain civilized; I hope we are up to the challenge.

Fred Belinsky
www.VillageHatShop.com

Hats From Around the World

2011-10-13T14:15:35-07:00

China, China, Asia, India, Vietnam, China. Enough already. It may come as a surprise to some, but the world outside of Asia has always manufactured stuff, including headwear. Today, China may be the epicenter for low priced apparel, but the world is still highly competitive when it comes to quality of materials, design, and workmanship.

In business today there is considerable emphasis on the importance of being a global brand. The argument is straight-forward-if you want to remain robust, your business needs to seek customers everywhere. As Internet merchants, we have been enthusiastic participants in this retail evolution. As a natural consequence of having customers everywhere on the planet, and fulfillment centers in San Diego and London, we have become increasingly more connected with hat manufactures that heretofore have had very little exposure in North America. It’s been eye-opening (and great fun I may add) to find, visit, and ultimately purchase and distribute fine hats from so many talented and venerable hatters from around the world. Some of these companies have been in business for over 100 years, and most are run by the descendants of the founders.

Visit our Hats from Around the World page where you’ll find cut-and-sewn hats and caps made from exclusive fabrics from City Sport (Belgium), Wigens (Sweden), and Hill Hats (New Zealand). See Borsalino (Italy), Signes (Spain), and Bigalli (Ecuador) for the highest quality straws and felts finely finished by master hatters. For top quality hand-knit woolens see Highland Knitwear (England) and Peruvian Trading Company (Peru). Also, our Jaxon Basque Beret is made in Spain’s Basque Country by a 163-year old beret manufacturer. We will be adding to this impressive list in 2012, so stay tuned.

We’re proud to welcome these new hat companies to our existing stable of better known international hat manufacturers. At Village Hat Shop you’ll also find Biltmore, Tilley, and Parkhurst (Canada), BC Hats and Akubra (Australia), Aegean (Greece), and Christy’s of London (England).

It’s high time, in this increasingly smaller world, that North Americans have the opportunity to purchase hats from fine hat manufacturers in all corners of the globe. Village Hat Shop customers – Enjoy.

Fred Belinsky
www.VillageHatShop.com

Ecommerce 2011: A Merchant’s Perspective

2011-07-21T11:55:32-07:00

July, 2011

In June, we began our 15^th year selling hats online. As those of you who follow VillageHatShop.com’s HAT BLOG know, I’ve been writing about ecommerce from its virtual inception. Looking over my past musings on this subject, I see that I’ve gone from excitement about how the Internet was going to democratize retail to fear that the same threats that small and medium size merchants experience from giant retail corporations offline would recur online.

There’s a great deal of talk about how ecommerce has escaped the recession. For example, comScore© indicates a 12% increase in online retail spending for the first quarter of 2011 compared to the same period last year. If intending to draw conclusions for merchants who run small online businesses, this data requires examination. For starters, the top 25 e-retailers now capture about 70% of all online sales (data per comScore). Many of these behemoths are the same suspects that we know offline – Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Hewlett-Packard, Apple as well as online consolidators and category killers like Amazon, Netflix, and the comparison shopping engines. I appreciate some of these businesses as much as the next (e.g. I do shop at Amazon), but it boggles the mind to know that the remaining hundreds of thousands of us trying to succeed online are competing for only 30% of the ecommerce shopping pie.

Making matters worse, the return on investment for advertising at online search engines like Google and Bing is eroding inexorably. In 2005, the cost to place an ad between the third and fourth position on Google Search was 38 cents per click (an overall average for all purchased keywords). In 2010, for approximately the same position, the price tag was $1.24 per click (data per Hochman Consultants©). I don’t have 2011 data, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that competing at Google AdWords has gotten significantly more difficult this year. So, what’s happening over at “Do No Evil”? These same dominant players in the Top 25 are bidding on virtually everything. Their business strategy is to create marketing campaigns and landing pages for merchandise categories irrespective of profit in the short term. If, for example, Amazon/Zappos (same company) wishes to corner the top paid advertising positions in the major search engines for say “umbrellas”, they can do so, for a long time, and without profit in that category. Eventually, established umbrella merchants - who need to make a living and cannot afford the top positions in paid search unless they make money - can’t survive. Ultimately, the online umbrella space goes to the mega-corp. What looked like a leveling of the playing field in those halcyon early days of the Internet has proven to be anything but. The nature and logic of capitalism and its tendency toward monopoly has again trumped small retail.

All of the above is operating within a macroeconomic climate that doesn’t help matters. All ships aren’t rising. I won’t digress into a political or economic treatise, but suffice to say that the clout that we hundreds of thousands of small Internet merchants wield in policy debates compared to the Top 25 and their ilk, strikes me as roughly equivalent to our relative strength online (70% them, 30% us). At this time, there is little evidence that in the near term there will much increase in the demand for goods. So, remaining viable requires gaining or holding one’s share of the stagnant size pie (market share).

Alas, we are not dead yet. Those of us who are running businesses where we know our products well and subscribe to age-old values of good customer service, good quality fairly priced merchandise, good information and communication, and all the rest, have survived. We continue to be found because we understand what thinking people want. That’s our only advantage. So far, it’s sufficient. We don’t have the resources for teams of in-house IT staffs that spin out the latest bells and whistles for improving web sites and the means to market to each person on the planet, individually. (“Personalization” is the latest buzz word in marketing. Soon you may turn on your computer and if you are “thinking” hats, you’ll receive 25 messages or banner ads – all from the Top 25 e-retailing giants.) Nor do we have the deep pockets that allow for money-losing/market-capturing advertising campaigns. I may be delusional, some kind of crazy romantic, but I don’t think this article is the last gasp of a dying ecommerce merchant. If, as I believe, people still want authenticity, then, we will be found. The entire world is not “virtual” (yet); many of us still seek a genuine destination (a there there, something with substance). And if you seek, ye shall still find human-scale businesses run by people who believe the world of commerce is more than a business plan and balance sheet to be perused by Wall Street or venture capitalists.

Admittedly, my tone is a bit more shrill as time goes on. We live in the age of the unthinkable; no one is predicting the breath-taking events that are unfolding with little or no warning. Will monster-size corporations and their allies bury us, or will the worm turn, and a new democratizing paradigm reign again?

Fred Belinsky©
VillageHatShop.com

Signes European Fine Men's Hats

2011-06-29T22:04:22-07:00

We arrived in Alicante Spain and were picked up at the airport by Jose Signes. We headed to a restaurant in a small fishing village on the Mediterranean where we were served a seafood paella par excellence, made to order per Jose’s arrangements in anticipation of our arrival. Fully satisfied, it was then to off to the hat factory and work.

Jose and his brother-in-law Carlos run the factory begun by Jose’s father in 1968. When the straw-hat makers in Gata de los Gorgos began to close as a result of price pressures from Chinese competition, The Signes’ made the decision to differentiate themselves from China by upping their focus on quality and workmanship. Their boutique factory approach has been rewarded as they have survived while most others in this small historical hat making community have closed their doors.

A lot of time is spent with each hat (as our videos of hat making at Signes will attest). They have no interest in competing with China on price. However, they do compare very favorably with other European factories on both quality and price in the Fine Hats sector of the industry. We worked with the family late into the night and produced an order for hats that we now present on our Signes brand page (followed by a night of tapas and fine Spanish wine).

We’re proud to be introducing these hats to North America.

FOR EXAMPLE:

Signes Packable Panama Fedora

I’ve been pursuing the Holy Grail in Panama hats for 30 years. Panamas have the reputation that they can be rolled up and packed away for travel. They also have the reputation as a finished fedora that is classic and grand-a stylish, hand-woven natural straw. This has posed a dilemma for hat merchants. More often than I can count, I’ve explained to customers that these two qualities are not embodied in the same hat. The buyer needs to choose a Panama that can suit one of these purposes or the other. [Read my article Letter to Monticristi Hat Customers for more on this.] However, I’ve never been fully satisfied with my explanation, i.e. that these "two different hats" were forever to be mutually exclusive. For decades, I’ve been trying to find a hat maker who can solve the puzzle of a snappy, high-quality finished fedora (that holds its shape) being embodied in the same hat that can be rolled for purposes of travel or storage.

It was a small town in Catalonia that I had my Eureka moment. All credit goes to Jose Signes. A "Panama" is a hat woven from a particular straw material (Carloduvica palmata) found in western South America. However – and this is important – the weaves differ from one region to another as well as the preparation of the material. The finest hats are often associated with Manabi Province in Ecuador (for example, many know the Panama hat reputation of Monticristi, a town in the province). The finest roll-able Panama hat is almost always one of these 20-grade hats that has not been blocked, sized, and finished. However, when one blocks, stiffens and finishes the hat, the natural properties of the material change and the hat, then, does not lend itself to the same material properties. Without divulging Signes’ trade secrets (or getting too technical), suffice to say that these hat Panama hat bodies come from another region of Ecuador. The material is prepared differently, and the weaving pattern is different. The quality is, nevertheless, superb. [See my article on Determining Panama Hat Quality for more on this]. Signes takes this unfinished Panama hat body and works its magic.

We now have it; both hats in one. The Holy Grail has been found.

Fred Belinsky
www.VillageHatShop.com

A Retail Store

2011-05-26T15:38:05-07:00

Village Hat Shop Flagship Store, 3821 4th Avenue, San Diego, California 92103

Every retail store is unique; upon arrival, all the senses are stirred. At its best, entering a shop environment is like experiencing an art installation. At the risk of sounding immodest, a true merchant thinks of his or her unimproved space not unlike that of a blank canvas.

On Saturday, we will celebrate the Grand Re-opening of our store at 3821 4th Avenue, San Diego. Last fall we moved our corporate offices and ecommerce fulfillment and warehousing operations out of this building. Since then we have been remodeling and remerchandising the space to serve as our flagship location, a department store of hats.

This May we began our 32nd year in the hat business. This store represents the culmination and distillation of everything we’ve learned as hatters and as merchants. More than ever, what matters most to us is to do this right. Not that we haven’t always endeavored to do retail right, but now we feel an even greater desire to make a contribution to our San Diego community and Hillcrest neighborhood. We know that success in business is a byproduct of this commitment.

We hope you will get a chance to visit us. Over the next year we will persist in putting all the pieces in place and this store will continue to evolve. Our goal is that our customer’s outing to the Village Hat Shop Flagship Store will be unlike anything previously experienced. If you visit, I hope you will agree that we’ve succeeded.

Sincerely,

Fred Belinsky
www.VillageHatShop.com

Taking Account of Ourselves

2011-01-12T12:31:17-08:00

Village Hat Shop Then and Now

In June, we will begin our fifteenth year selling hats at VillageHatShop.com. It is difficult to fathom how far this sales channel has evolved. In the beginning, to my great surprise and delight, it really was a "if you build it, they will come" opportunity. A search for "hats" elicited a handful of replies; a strange amalgam of search results. If memory serves me well, there was in fact a hat retailer – a single store operation in Washington State – who preceded us on the web. This early adaptor never developed and is a nonfactor online today. Another result was for a straw hat – similar to Panamas – made in a small village in Campeche, Mexico. This obscure hat material made in an off-the-beaten-track corner of the Yucatan Peninsula, woven in underground caverns by descendants of the Maya (who did not speak Spanish) had a promoter on the Internet (before the word "internet" was in our vocabulary!). Aside from another result or two, that was it for a "hats" query in early 1997. Today Google returns about 74,500 results for this keyword.

These good old days are long gone. If you build it now, they will not come-unless you do a whole lot of other things well, and work it very hard. VillageHatShop.com has come a long way in this short time; if we hadn’t we would not still be here. The trajectory of where ecommerce is headed requires ever more diligence if we are to continue winning and holding your business. The novelty of buying online ended years ago; now it’s perform well or lose your customer. We are up to the challenge. Satisfying the needs of our customers are what we have always believed was fundamental to successful retailing. So, we aren’t intimidated if this is to be the criterion that separates the winning merchants from the losers – it ought to be.

I am a different merchant than I was fifteen years ago. I’m stretching and growing – in some ways that are more dispassionate and data-driven, while holding dear to the zeal and idealism that helped bring The Village Hat Shop to where we are today. Finding the right middle ground is not easy. On the one hand the goal is survival, beating the competition. However, if the values of the business are not clearly focused on making a positive difference in people’s lives-and, by extension, the greater community - than why bother?

Fifteen years ago, the world of commerce as it exists today was unthinkable. Where will it be fifteen years from now? I hope that the relationship between customer and merchant and merchant and employee will always be the sine qua non for success in retail. If it is, we may still be around. Search (in engines like Google and Bing) as we know it today, I believe will be gone. But somehow people will get connected to good businesses (likely, more efficiently than now). So being a good business, by all measures is all that matters, and all that will matter.

Fred Belinsky
VillageHatShop.com

Hats and Literature: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

2010-12-08T18:44:10-08:00

Illustration by "Phiz" from the 1950 Modern Library Edition of David Copperfield. Top Hats were de rigour in 19th Century England.

Readers of the HAT BLOG and other Information and Resources pages at VillageHatShop.com [see the top navigation bar] know that headwear’s role, as symbol and metaphor, in art and literature is vast, stretching back to the beginning of humankind. One finds never-ending examples of hats being used to convey nuanced – or not so nuanced – ideas. Here are a few examples plucked from my latest read, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.

Mr. Dick is a masterfully wrought character. The only comparable example in fiction that comes to mind is Chauncey Gardiner portrayed by Peter Sellers in the movie Being There. Dickens: "This veneration Mr. Dick extended to the Doctor, whom he thought the most subtle and accomplished philosopher of any age. It was long before Mr. Dick ever spoke to him otherwise than bareheaded; and even when he and the Doctor had struck up quite a friendship, and would walk together by the hour, on that side of the courtyard which was known as the Doctor’s Walk, Mr. Dick would pull off his hat at intervals to show his respect for wisdom and knowledge."

David Copperfield was madly in love with Dora. He was obsessed with everything associated with her. Copperfield: "I never saw such curls – how could I, for there never were such curls! – as those she shook out to hide her blushes. As to the straw hat and blue ribbons which was on the top of the curls, if I could only have hung it up in my room in Buckingham Street, what a priceless possession it would have been!" He references Dora’s hat and her curls again on the pages that follow. I do agree that the relationship of a women’s hat and her hair can be very attractive. As a hat merchant, and someone who has been asked his opinion on matters of this kind hundreds of times, I have often stated words to the effect, and to many a woman, "I like the way that hat works with your hair." Women in hats were alluring in Dicken’s day, and for many men, they still are.

In a most dramatic passage, Mr. Peggotty decides to commit his life to finding his niece who ran off with David’s friend, "I’m a-going to seek her, fur and wide." As he finishes a poignant soliloquy and is ready to depart, this description follows: "He said this solemnly, bareheaded; then putting on his hat, he went down the stairs and away." That simple act of putting on a hat and leaving had a kind of literary power in the 19th Century, you see it in pre-1960 films as well, but is virtually gone in this day and age. [Note the slightly different uses of bareheadedness in the Mr. Dick passage and in this one. Mr. Dick refrained from wearing a hat as deference to power, much the same as a king’s subject would remove his hat in the company of the king. Mr. Peggotty’s deference was to the solemnity of his discourse and implied an oath (to a power even greater than a king).]

The book is full of references to hats. Here’s my last example, a slight variation of a metaphor that is in my collection of Hat Metaphors and Similes. Mrs. Crupp, Davids’ landlady in London, is eccentric, nutty in fact. One of her paranoid preoccupations is her "… constitutional objection to spies, intruders, and informers. She named no names, she said—let them the cap fitted wear it . . ."

Sleuthing for hats in literature is quite simple; references are easy to find. Social status, religious observance, challenge to the enemy, temperament, emotion, financial means, geographic identity, historical period, hobbies and interests, and much more is illuminated by the use of hats. As R. Turner Wilcox in her forward to the classic The Mode in Hats and Headdress writes, "No part of costume is so universally important as the headdress, which is worn even when body garments are dispensed with, as the appearance of the aborigines abundantly proves." With the force of expression that hats intrinsically carry, it is no wonder why artists and writers make copious use of them-on their heads and in their work.

Fred Belinsky
VillageHatShop.com

The Other Hat from South America

2010-09-17T14:46:35-07:00

North American hat aficionados look to purveyors in the southwestern hemisphere for two iconic hat materials and their attendant styles. Carloduvica palmata – a plant from coastal Ecuador – after a tedious process of harvesting, cleaning, shredding, bleaching, sorting, and weaving, followed by blocking, finishing, etc. makes it way around as the world as “Panama hats”. Panama hat styles include fedoras, optimos, gamblers, virtually every hat style imaginable – Panama (or paja toquilla as the locals call it) is the straw hat material, not any particular style.

After Panama, the second South American hat material that comes most immediately to mind is the wool and alpaca that is used to make hats that we associate with the people living in Peru’s Andes Mountains. Although at The Village Hat Shop we’ve been selling Panama hats consistently throughout our thirty-year history, we have never been able to find a reliable vendor for these Peruvian hats.

Until now! The Peruvian Trading Company is a family owned and operated business that is over 20 years old. After years of touring college campuses with the traditional styles, Patricia and Javier Dam - being inspired by their forward-thinking student clientele – put their imagination to work and, voila, their beautiful designs and colors moved PTC, and these iconic hats, to the next level.

For the making of the products, the company identified the most reliable knitters in the highland hat making community and a cottage industry was born. The knitters, mostly women, work from home. Hat making adds to the daily bread basket as the income is about twice the pay for similar work.

Given our strict criteria for adding vendors to our lineup of hat brands, The Peruvian Trading Company could not be a better fit. We are proud to feature this line. We trust that our customers will appreciate these hats and will enjoy wearing an item of apparel that is worthy even beyond its eminent functionality.

Learn more, view this informative slide show.

We hope the comments below, unedited, from a few of the knitters – forwarded to us by Mr. Dam of The Peruvian Trading Company - will create a natural trading circle connecting the VHS customer with the PTC knitter. In this day and age, with modern communications being what they are, we hope this serves as a commercial model of what is possible in the way of human connectedness.

SANTA SULLCA QUISPE

Age 42

Children 6, 2 at school, 2 at college, 2 with there own families.

Santa says her life has turned much better since she started working with us because now she is able to give her children a better education since her first 2 children only finished High School( a feat on itself for a low income family ) Now her middle 2 kid's go to college. Santa also says that life itself makes her feel happier. She mentions that all of this is possible because her wages have been doubled from what other businesses pay.

HILARIA VENTURA PACO

Age 44

Children 8

Hilaria says that all of her children are able to go to school and in fact one of her Daughters is braking the mold in her families' past by being the first one going to college in Lima and this is all possible because she is earning twice as much as before. Hilaria's sister has join the team of knitters, her name is RICARDINA VENTURA PACO , she has 6 children and she is so exited that she can send her kid's to school in a full stomach and is looking into the future with hope.

LEONARDA CURASMA YACHA

Age 35

Children 2

Leonarda says that compared to years past now she can afford better things for her kid's and has been able to send her oldest one to a pre-college academy to prepare for his college admission test and now the fights for money with her husband have stoped because she now has her own after she started working with us.

GLORIA CLEMENTE ÑAHUI

Age 38

Children 3

Gloria says that she is very happy knitting all this silly hats for us and wishes that they keep coming, also mentions that her diet has improved drastically because she can buy better food for her children and also to better educate them, her oldest is also going to a pre-college academy and all of them are doing much better at school. Says "KEEP'EM COMING"

All the ladies working on this group(not just the once here mentioned) agree on something, they are very thankful for the opportunity to work in it and they want this not to stop happening. This group is composed by 35 women and 2 men from the state of HUANCAVELICA and the districts of Ascencion, Huanaspampa and Paturpanpa.

WE ARE EAGERLY AWAITING OUR FIRST SHIPMENT OF HATS FROM THE PERUVIAN TRADING COMPANY. WE HOPE TO BE IN STOCK BY THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER.

Thank you,
Fred Belinsky
The Village Hat Shop
www.VillageHatShop.com