by Jared Glovsky

Everybody up here knows that hat … whether they’ve heard of Mr. Stormy Kromer or not.

After all, the original Stormy Kromer cap - featuring ear flaps that can be worn up or down, and whose round shape has a way of complementing even the most misshapen head - is steeped in our northern culture, past and present.

In every faded black-and-white photo depicting early 20th century Lake Superior country loggers standing beneath towering cords of lumber or beside huge Belgian horses, it seems someone’s wearing one. It can be seen perched atop a Moose, an Elk or a Kiwanis volunteer in just about any group photo taken in the days when men put on hats before they left the house and often didn’t take them off when they came back in.

The older man who chopped firewood near my folks’ house on Saturday morning and the one who sold us a Christmas tree out of a white trailer festooned with colored bulbs both wore Kromers.     These days, many of my dad’s friends still sport the look as they while away mornings in cafes. And more and more, you even see Kromers on the crowns of my generation.

Yes, just as apple pie is “American,” the classic Stormy Kromer cap is unmistakably “Up North.”

So where better than Ironwood - a town of 6,000 on the far western end of the Upper Peninsula and on the leeward side of Lake Superior where upward of 130 inches of snow falls each winter - might there be for Bob Jacquart to continue and to grow this uniquely boreal business?

Of course, Stormy Kromer wasn’t always a U.P. company nor was its creator, George “Stormy” Kromer, an actual Yooper (though he seems to have been one in spirit).

Born before the turn of the 20th century, Stormy was definitely a man of his age: scrappy and innovative … and always looking for ways to do things better. Hailing from Kaukauna, Wisconsin, he was a pretty fair ballplayer for a while and later a railroad engineer with the Chicago and Northwestern. Both occupations would contribute to his innovation in headwear.

While we know Stormy for his woolen cap, he and his wife, Ida, are credited with creation of another classic: the blue-and-white-striped railroad engineer cap. Story has it that engineer Kromer lost one too many hats in the wind as he scanned for trouble outside his engine window. He designed a tight cap with a flexible visor that could be pulled down tightly. Ida, a wonderful seamstress, began cutting and sewing.

That accomplishment was saluted in a children’s story by Leone Arlandson, Mr. Puffer-Bill Train Engineer (Golden Books, 1965).

The original wool Kromer cap was invented by Stormy in 1903. A close look reveals his headgear’s baseball influence: Designwise, the six-paneled, top-stitched hat is essentially an old-style baseball cap with earflaps and a more flexible visor fitting snug around the head.

The family built a company around the cap, but by 1965, with Stormy in failing health, the Kromer Cap Company was sold to Richard Grossman of Milwaukee.

During the next 35 years, Richard divided resources between the Kromer and specialized welding caps from his facility in Wisconsin.
It turned out, however, that the stronger future seemed to be in welding caps. So in 2001, the company decided to commit its full-time energy to welding gear and announced that it would discontinue the Kromer.

Shockwaves rippled through the northern communities nestled in old-growth forests. (Okay, maybe not shockwaves, but some serious discussion.)

That news reached Bob Jacquart over coffee in an Ironwood diner.

“I was shocked,” he recalls. “I knew the cap; I knew a lot of people who wore it. It was part of the culture around here, my culture. I thought, this cannot be allowed to happen. My response was to call my office and say, ‘Get that company on the phone!’”

Two hours later, the phone number for Richard Grossman was on his desk, and, in a relatively short period of time, he had acquired the Stormy Kromer hat and name.

Bob’s move wasn’t totally a lark. The Kromer cap was a well-suited addition to his company, Jacquart Fabric Products, which started as a single tailor shop in 1973 and grew to manufacturer of fabric items from boat covers to duffel bags, doggie beds to pillowcases, and offers upholstery services.

I meet with Bob Jacquart in mid-December. The conditions were ideal to be wearing a Stormy Kromer cap - a dim, slate-gray morning with heavy, wind-driven snow sweeping sideways across still verdant evergreen thickets in Ironwood.

Just like the hats that he acquired, Bob is down-to-earth and amiable, with unmistakable Yooper geniality. The day we met, he was dressed in a flannel shirt and, naturally, a Kromer hat. He quickly comes across as a man who laughs a lot.

“I essentially bought a clothing line and the name,” Bob says of his Stormy Kromer purchase. “They were manufacturing about 3,000 hats annually when I took on the operation, and that’s what I had in mind.”

Bob might have been content simply to keep the hat in production, but then one night in a Mercer, Wisconsin, supper club, the true potential of the Kromer cap sprang to life. Bob struck up a conversation with a motorcycle rider who asked what he did for a living. When Bob mentioned that he’d recently added the Kromer cap to the Jacquart family of products, the impressed rider informed him that the Kromer cap is ideal when riding a cycle in cool northern latitudes.

Envisioning hard-riding bikers in Kromers certainly expanded the possibilities from wool-cap clad little old men hocking Christmas trees.

“That was the first notion I had that something could be done with this, that there just might be a market out there, and maybe more than one,” Bob says of that conversion.

His curiosity piqued, Bob contacted a Milwaukee marketing firm, hoping to create a brochure to send to the folks at Harley-Davidson. The meeting was arranged and, in another epiphanous moment, the firm’s representative looked wide-eyed at Bob and said, “You really don’t know what you’re sitting on here, do you?”

The answer, Bob admits today, was, no, he really didn’t. All he wanted to do was to keep the Stormy Kromer cap from dying. Now a vast opportunity seemed to be opening.

Since then, Bob has leveraged the Stormy Kromer mystique, banking on people who might otherwise not be familiar with the name, but who nevertheless cry out, “Omigosh, I know that hat!”

Story Layout by Randy Bauer

Built around a tongue-in-cheek sensibility, a well-textured branding push of Stormy Kromer Mercantile has been under way since the cap celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2003. (Harley-Davidson celebrated its 100th the same year).

Of course, all the marketing in the world won’t make a bad cap great. The Stormy Kromer cap delivers. It is hand-stitched, woolen and waterproof and really will keep one’s head warm. More importantly, it has a kind of silly lovability to it.

Bob and his staff promote the Stormy Kromer as a lovable, and desirable, piece of Americana - northern Americana - with lines like: “The Stormy Kromer cap: Six panels of wooly inner strength” and “Stormy Kromer: A timeless approach to the simple fact that warm heads make happy people” or “Stormy Kromer: Allowing people to live where they shouldn’t.”

While the traditional view of a Kromer is on a man’s head, women loved the Kromer, too. A special Ida Kromer hat, named for Stormy’s wife, was added in a perky (yet functional) pink. New York fashionistas might not jump all over the “Ida” idea, says Lindsay Piper, Stormy Kromer Mercantile’s marketing manager, but it’s nevertheless become a big seller because American women are hanging out more in what was once strictly the boys’ clubhouse - the hunting shack, the deer stand, the duck blind or driving a snowmobile or a Harley.

As another way to bolster this brand with a long history, Bob has solicited Stormy Kromer stories from folks around the country and the world.

“We get lots of stories sent to us, all the time. People have buried their loved ones in these hats; fishing buddies leave them at favorite fishing holes as a memorial. I know of at least one that was left at Isle Royale. There is a lot of sentimentality surrounding the Kromer, probably because it’s been around so long.”

People are catching on. On the company’s website, a scrapbook holds names, photos and stories of people in the news who are proud Stormy Kromer wearers, like Resi Stiegler of the U.S. Olympic Ski Team, motivational speaker and one-day Iditarod racer Deb Glenn, and Pinconning, Michigan’s Mayor Mike Duranczyk sporting a pretty darned elegant black Kromer and a tux at a wedding.

Bob Jacquart has his own family story. A long-forgotten photo of his grandfather was discovered recently. In the photo, his lips teeter on the verge of a reluctant smile as he holds up a trophy fish. But Bob wasn’t noticing the fish. On his grandfather’s head was, sure enough, a Stormy Kromer cap, circa the 1940s.

While the hats dominate the brand and people’s memories, Bob wanted to expand distribution out of traditional outdoor stores, where for years Kromers hung on wire racks above bottled deer scent and cigarette displays, and into glitzier sporting good stores like Cabela’s and Gander Mountain.

To do this,” he says, “we had to have more than just the hat, we had to have a clothing line.”

As a result, Stormy Kromer Mercantile offers much more than a way to keep your head warm in winter. The line has an assortment of quality flannel and fleece pullovers, shirts, jackets and vests, as well as T-shirts and posters.

And those 3,000 hats a year that Bob bought into in 2001 have jumped to nearly 60,000 annually … and counting.
Penetrating the complete outdoors market has been a boon; the Stormy Kromer cap is a natural fit for nearly every outdoor activity, from motorcycle riding to backpacking and hiking to hunting and fishing.

Success has allowed the company to be generous in partnering to use the caps for fundraising incentives with the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation and to give caps to folks like the AH-64D Longbow Apache Attack Helicopter Company stationed in Iraq and the “Team Norway” ski team representing America in the Olympics. “Stormy Kromer is a small company based in a tightly knit community in which there are a lot of deserving non-profit organizations and charities. Rather than picking favorites, Stormy Kromer tries to help each one at least a little, focusing donations in the local region,” says Lindsay.

1238 Wall Street, Ironwood, MI 49938 888-455-2253 906-932-1339 www.stormykromer.com

The Kromer brand is not the only thing expanding at Jacquart Fabric Products. The small downtown Ironwood tailor shop with one employee has blossomed into 150 employees housed in three buildings that encompass 80,000 square feet and sport the latest in laser-guided cutting machines.

The operation is divided into three divisions, each of which handles the company’s various lines, from marine canvas products, awnings and tarps to upholstery services (they can do Green Bay Packers colors on a sofa cushion or power colors on your office furniture). They do contract sewing, where they handle, for instance, production for Consumer Digest’s No. 1-rated dog bed manufacturer.

And, of course, there is the Stormy Kromer line.

Bob Jacquart’s desire to keep a northern tradition alive - and his company’s energy in promoting the brand - has been repaid with rapid, steady growth during the last six years but also with the fun he’s had giving the brand a fresh coat of paint by more or less allowing the old coat to shine through.

Bob says that wherever he travels, at even the haughtiest black-tie affairs where the elite of the outdoors media world congregate to congratulate one another, the reaction is always the same: They know that hat. And now, thanks to him and his team’s efforts, those same people are beginning to know the name: Stormy Kromer.

Jared Glovsky admits that he did not know the name of the famed caps before embarking to Ironwood for this story. His head is much smarter - and warmer - now.