Six years ago I wanted a simple ball cap. I've always worn them when I fly, and we had just announced a merger between my company (Northwest Airlines) and Delta Air Lines. New rules... new procedures... new uniforms. Being naturally nostalgic, I wanted a visible reminder that I was a Northwest pilot. I searched the web for anyone who produced such a thing. They didn't exist. Anywhere!
A new solution was to have one custom made for me. At that time I believe it would cost me about $35 for one hat! So like any good (cheap) pilot, I decided to spend $400 and have a bunch made. Now the only question was how to get rid of them. Word of mouth and eBay worked for awhile, but I wanted a website. So with some help from Will Henderson and others, pilotballcaps.com was born. But you can't just have a website for ONE product. I really liked the hats that our manufacturer made, so I had Air Force and Navy pilot ball caps made. So now I had 5 designs, with more great comments from customers coming in weekly.
Now as I sit in our pilotballcaps.com office, I look around at the 40+ designs, most in different colors. Six years ago it was just for pilots, but now we have Aircrew, Navigator, Squadron and Airline hats. I'm surrounded by over 1500 hats sitting on the shelves, 100s of shipping boxes and everything we need to serve our customers. Most important are the hundreds of great aviation stories I get from my customers, and thousands of satisfied aviators around the world that are wearing our hats...that just kind of happened into being.
So Happy Anniversary to our fledgling business, and thank you to all of our (very) loyal repeat customers! We'll keep on "Selling the Best ball caps to the Best Aviators in the World...because everybody deserves a great ball cap!"
And this hat started it all!
