The Tactile Group office is in a building situated between Sansom and Chestnut Streets. The block is full of store fronts: jewelry and bath goods, gift shops and small eateries. But one hundred years ago, the block was home to the Stetson Store, a retail outlet for the most famous hat in American history.
The store address was on Chestnut Street, but the back door was one block south at 1225 Sansom Street, and the large, engraved sign remains over the entrance to a sushi restaurant. Sections of the building we work in were reportedly part of the Stetson Store facility.
I didn’t know before I worked here that Stetson, so emblematic of the American West, was a Philadelphia company, and the retail store was just a fraction of its presence in the city. The Stetson factory in the Kensington area employed up to 5,000 people at one point and offered everything from housing to on-site health care for its employees.
The founder, John B. Stetson, was born to a hat-making family in New Jersey, but when he returned to the East Coast in 1865 after a trip west, he opened a one-man factory near Callowhill Street in Philadelphia. There he began to build and sell a hat he’d first designed during his expedition to Pikes Peak in Colorado.
During the expedition, Stetson noticed the failings of the coonskin caps typically worn by the cowhands, miners, and migrants he met. The caps were common for the time and place, but they were soggy in the rain, hot in the sun, and attractive to fleas. John B. Stetson decided to create something more functional.
The westerners he met worked outdoors in all kinds of weather, and needed something that would be useful in most elements. He chose a lightweight, waterproof fur felt, and shaped it into a wide brim that would protect the face against sun, rain, or snow, and a high crown with straight sides that would insulate the wearer’s head from heat and cold. The hat was lined, and had a sweat band at the base of the crown. You could use the hat as a fan, a water bowl, or even a sleep mask, and still look cool when you put it back on your head.
John Stetson called his hat, which was both functional and good-looking, “The Boss of the Plains,” and sold his prototype to a bullwhacker, who was reportedly impressed enough to pay five dollars for it (roughly $75 dollars today).
John Stetson’s hat was so perfectly designed for its environment that it quickly became an icon of western North America, and the United States in particular. Stetson’s name became synonymous with the style itself. The hat was worn by people from Canada to Mexico, by rich and poor, by criminal and lawman, and by people of nearly every ethnic group who occupied that land.
The Stetson hat represents the capacity of great design and quality production to make an enduring mark.
We at the Tactile Group find that inspiring.