Mass Production
Stetson sent a sample hat to merchants throughout the Southwest with a letter asking for a minimum order of a dozen “Boss of the Plains” hats. The hat was an immediate success: in less than a year Stetson set up a new factory in the outskirts of Philadelphia to handle his growing business. By 1886 Stetson's hat company was the largest in the world, and had mechanized the hat-making industry ("producing close to 2 million hats a year by 1906"). The Stetson Hat Co. was sold to another hat company, but these hats still bear the Stetson name with the hats being produced in St. Louis. "Today's cowboy hat has remained basically unchanged in construction and design since the first one was created in 1865 by J.B. Stetson."
Stetson also produced “dress” hats, distinguished from “western” hats by narrower brims and shorter crowns but it was his “Boss of the Plains” style hat and its many variants which fueled the company’s growth and fame.
Read more about this topic: Stetson
Famous quotes containing the words mass production, mass and/or production:
“Teach those Asians mass production?
Teach your grandmother egg suction.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“... this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)