Our Story.Built For Good Times.

I consider myself a hat addict. I never leave the house without one. Back in 2005, that was true as ever.

I went rafting down the mighty Toutle River with some of my closest friends. I was too young to have a license, but I had a raft, and that was almost as cool. Halfway down the river our raft capsized, and my khaki quilted Burton hat, my favorite at the time, fell off into the murky water of the Toutle.

The next time we faced that river, I was determined not to lose my hat again. I took the shoelaces out of my shoes, cut a small hole in the side of my new hat with a pocket knife, and the first Findlay hat was born. I called it my water hat, and I wore it every time I went to the river or lake.

We almost named this company "Action Hats," but that just did not sound right. Around the time we were looking for a name, my grandpa, Harold Findlay, was on his last leg of life.

My middle name is Findlay, named after him, and he was always an inspiration to me. I loved our family name, and the "F" and the "Y" happen to go well together on a hat.

With my grandparents' permission, we moved forward with the name Findlay Hats. My grandpa passed shortly before our launch, but my grandma stuck around long enough to see the ride. She was always so tickled by this company, excited by every bit of it. She joked about when her royalty checks would start rolling in, autographed a stack of our thank you cards, and loved being part of it. I made sure she got free hats for life. They are both gone now, but I am proud to carry their name forward.

Somewhere in this process we were picked up by the largest action sports retailer in the world, Zumiez. They saw our active community and unique product and gave us a shot. That opportunity gave our garage based brand a chance to be seen around the country, in close to 200 of their stores.

We made a point to travel to as many of those locations as we could. We wanted to share the product knowledge and meet the teams that would be selling Findlay Hats. Those trips were an amazing experience, and we made a handful of friends we still keep in touch with to this day.

That night I posted the photo on the front page of the internet, Reddit. Within minutes the post started gaining traction. People were into our story and liked our hats.

Soon we had thousands of people on the website making purchases. We sold out of almost every hat in stock within a couple of hours and had a backlog of hundreds of customer emails and questions, all while I was running on zero sleep, jet lagged to the max, and thousands of miles from the garage.

When it was all said and done, the photo had been seen over 2.9 million times that evening. Our website did more traffic in one day than in the entire previous year. We pulled a couple of months of sales in a 24 hour period.

Lucky for us, our guy Nick was back in the garage and handled it with grace. He packed and shipped orders on his end while I ordered inventory and managed customer service from my laptop. That mini viral photo elevated the brand to the next level. It gave us the funds to invest in our four head embroidery machine and introduced the Findlay Force to hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

This was probably one of the top five worst days of my life. Sarah and I broke up after four years of dating. A half hour later we got a photo showing that a major company had copied our patent-pending lace technology, possibly in every one of their 1,200 locations. Bad day.

I rushed down to their local store, and sure enough, they had three hats using our lace technology, one with our classic Mt. Findlay triangle. The hats had no pocket, and the laces were actually tied behind the grommet.

In July 2017 we were bursting at the seams. We brought our friend and part time employee Savannah on full time. We simply could not keep up with demand. Production and inventory had crept into our living room and dining room, and the garage was no longer an efficient place to work.

We lucked into a 5,500 square foot space a couple of miles down the road. It needed a lot of TLC, but we could afford it, and we jumped on it. The next couple of months went to cleaning the place up and making it our own. We traded our four head embroidery machine for a fifteen head, laid down turf, built a mini ramp, and opened a showroom.

As demand kept growing, we kept hiring. We brought on Carol for production, Brett for sales, Monique for sales and customer service, and Oliver for our laser cutter, vinyl cutter, and general handyman needs. Cara came back to run video production and marketing, and our longtime in-house graphic designer, Alex, made the trek from sunny Arizona to Portland to work with us full time. That took our team from four to twelve people in a single year.

Did we panic? Oh yeah. It was intense, and I am not going to hide that. Business can be a cruel mistress, and things were rough. Despite the higher expenses and the growth that did not show up in 2019, we buckled down, got scrappy, and found a way through. I lost some hair and stressed plenty, but we kept our heads down and kept building.

We reviewed our options and made some key changes. Instead of chasing growth, we focused on maintaining what we already had. We added a new Premium Box to the website, simplified our hat offerings, and started dropping new "Weekly Exclusive" hats so there was something new and exciting every week. 2020 started off strong. This was going to be our year.

One thing we did not expect from the pandemic was online shopping hitting an all time high. As a business that is 80% online, we were positioned to benefit. Somehow our daily order volume kept growing and growing until we blew past our previous highs. We were back into a phase of hiring new people and investing in new equipment. Demand was high, but COVID restrictions still set us back as the whole world felt the squeeze of slower supply lines.

In the middle of all of it, we found our dream retail location in downtown Portland. The timing could not have been worse, but we figured it was a worthwhile gamble that things would eventually get better. We took the leap of faith and opened our first retail space in early 2021.

With the move, we brought in our new retail store. Having everything under one roof lets the store stock a huge mix of hats, apparel, and accessories. There is something new in there every day, and we are really proud of what that place has become.

We have also leaned hard into live shopping. Seven times a day we do a one on one video chat with someone from the Findlay Force, and it has become a huge part of the store's success.