Indiana Jones and the fedora boom
In a summer crowded with blockbusters, Disney may sweat to recoup the $295m it reportedly spent making “Dial of Destiny”, the fifth and final Indiana Jones film, out on June 30th in America. But the movie is already a hit for a firm in another industry. Herbert Johnson, a 134-year-old London hatmaker, is fielding soaring demand for a certain fedora.
“It’s been just glorious,” says Michelle Poyer-Sleeman, the master hatter who designed the latest iteration of the Poet, the hat first donned by Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1981. The firm had to keep the product under its hat until a couple of weeks before the movie’s launch. But already the “Destiny Poet” has caused a seven-fold rise in Herbert Johnson’s revenue since June last year. A backlog of over 300 orders waits to be handmade in a workshop that hums with the sound of fans, steam and irons.
The boom marks a sharp turnaround for the firm. After the success of “Raiders” it provided Indy’s hats in the follow-ups, “Temple of Doom” (1984) and “Last Crusade” (1989). But a downturn in hat-wearing brought hard times. Venerable hatters such as Italy’s Borsalino went bust. Herbert Johnson was sold and for a while stopped making its hats in-house. For “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, Indy’s fourth adventure, in 2008, the producers went elsewhere.
2023-06-29 05:12:30
Link from www.economist.com