Hat maker Keryn Nicholson sizes a customer for some headgear. Her Nicholson Hat Co. moved to a new space in Fresno’s Tower District about two years ago. Photo via Keryn Nicholson

For Keryn Nicholson, what started as a hobby eventually became a brick-and-mortar business that she hopes to expand.

Nicholson is the owner of Nicholson Hat Co., a custom hat making shop on Van Ness Avenue in Fresno’s Tower District specializing in Western and classic hats.

Despite not ever studying marketing, she has worked as a marketing director for a specialty running store, and served on the visual display team for clothing store Anthropologie.

She started her path as a milliner, or hat maker, nearly eight years ago after her father gifted one of his old Stetson hats that she wanted to resize.  

“It didn’t fit me properly, but I always wanted to wear it. Him giving me that hat sort of sparked an interest in how I could make adjustments to the hats. No one taught me how to build hats, I taught myself,” Nicholson said.

Nicholson opened her shop about two years ago.

A majority of her clientele are people in the agriculture industry. She said it’s wonderful to serve the people of the Central Valley instead of just shipping her hats outside of the area.

However, Nicholson does have clients all over the nation and in other countries including Australia and France.

 

New Old West fashion

Nicholson said that Western style hats and clothing have never gone out of fashion on the ranch, and it weaves in and out of mainstream fashion.

Within the last five or six years there has been a resurgence of Western fashion, she added. The popularity can be attributed to the hit television series Yellowstone starring Kevin Costner.

Nicholson also makes custom fedoras, which are also popular with clients. She said her clientele is comprised of actors, musicians and others in the arts. She also makes fedora-style hats geared more towards outdoorsmen.

While chain Western wear stores such as Boot Barn could have good hats, Nicholson said that a custom-made hat is typically made with better quality materials that fit clients better. It could last a lifetime if cared for properly.

 

Same materials, higher prices

As with virtually every industry, costs for materials have gone up since the pandemic and recent economic trends.

“They’ve gone up significantly,” Nicholson said. “Most custom hatmakers — all of our prices have had to reflect that. It affected all of our supply chain. In order to stay afloat you have to raise your prices, but luckily I haven’t had to raise them too much.”

Though she loves having a business in the Tower District, Nicholson doesn’t expect her current store to be a permanent location.

She said she wants to eventually move into a new space to allow for more display room, workspace and storage.

Nicholson rents a booth at the Clovis Rodeo every year, which gives her business great exposure and lots of sales. The start of the rodeo season gets busy with orders, she added.

 

 

Busy at the shop

Along with making custom hats, she also cleans and refurbishes hats, she said.

“I can typically repair or rebuild a hat over and over again. I have hats that are over 70 years old that I can clean, block and rebuild into something completely new. There’s not a lot of things that you can do with,” Nicholson said.

Nicholson has a goal to find an assistant next year to help her around the shop, and possibly turn that position into an apprenticeship.

She uses Instagram to get the word out about her business, and also gets customers from word-of-mouth, which to her is ideal.

Nicholson’s hats have been featured in several news outlets and print magazines, including Good Morning America, Localish ABC30, Central Valley PBS, Made in the Valley ABC30 and Infiniti Global News.

Nicholson said as society continues to push mechanization and artificial intelligence, more people will start to make handmade products.

“We feel strongly because of how everything is going, the desire for handmade, human crafted things is also going to go up. Hopefully that is the case, but we will see,” she said.