Did Arnold Hatters make their own hats?

[Blackthorn]

I picked up an "Arnold Hatters" fedora last year on the Bay. It's really well made, which got me to thinking...did they make their own hats? Or did they contract them out to another company and only put their names on the hats? If they made them, did they do so in their store in NY? Was there a hatmaker sitting there making hats by hand or were they set up with machinery? There's not much on the Net about them, other than all the news of their store closing.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I don't think they made their own hats, but subcontracted them. I bought one of their "Raider" teardrop fedoras in around 1988 when they were still going under the name "Scott Hatters" (which was also what it said on the liner), but it was the same Eighth Avenue store across from the Port Authority that was their next-to-last location as Arnonld Hatters. It didn't look like the back of the store was big enough for anything but storing stock. There were just a couple of guys working there, a lot of hats on display (the long, narrow front windows were nearly as deep as the store's interior), and there was a steamer for shaping hats running at one end of the counter. My guess is that they originally subcontracted from NY-area hat makers, but by the end of their run when NY was no longer a manufacturing town, they were buying from someone like Biltmore (a la Miller Hats).

Anyway, mine was a very nice hat, and I got almost two decades of wear out of it before it finally got too shrunken, beat-up, and broken-down for even hiking use.

 

[Blackthorn]

Thanks, Doc, I was also wondering how long they had been Arnold Hatters, and that gives me some perspective. So they became Arnold Hatters after they were Scott Hatters. So this hat may have been made in the 90's.