Take Hats Off to Innovative Marketing

When Abbie Dwelle, Wendy Hawkins, Olivia Griffin, and Kirsten Hove purchased Paul’s Hat Works in San Francisco, the four females began referring to themselves as the “Four Pauls.” A Retail Customer Experience posting reported that the four also came up with innovative guerilla marketing techniques—low cost, locally-based, attention-getting.
     Paul’s Hat Works custom-crafted men’s hats at prices ranging from around $250 to more than $850. Although the shop headed up the San Francisco hat trade since 1918, the purchase by the Four Pauls in 2009 coincided with blockbuster interest in the TV series “Mad Men,” about an era in which businessmen wore hats.
     Building on this interest, Paul’s Hat Works set up the front windows of the store to reflect scenes from the 1950’s and 1960’s. They then invited visitors to try on a hat and sit in the window for a bit. The Four Pauls sent out press releases, posted the invite on the store’s blog, and had updates on their Facebook page. Soon word-of-mouth took hold. In the end, there were too many volunteers for sitting than store hours allowed. Sales increased by about 10%.
     Then President Obama was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle Style section wearing a Paul’s Hat Works chapeau designed specifically for him. The sponsor was local author Robert Mailer Anderson, a regular customer of the shop, according to the Chronicle article.
     But for such a celebrity endorsement to have maximum influence, it needs to make sense to prospective shoppers that the celebrity is endorsing and why. After all, President Obama hadn’t ordered the hat. Fortunately for Paul’s Hat Works, Mr. Anderson says he extracted from the president a quote that in wearing the black-beaver-fur-felt fedora with a vintage grosgrain band in grey when going out on a date night with wife Michelle, “In a hat like this, I could get lucky.”
     With her excellent guerilla marketing sense, Ms. Griffin, one of the Four Pauls, added the angle of benefit to society by saying, “It would be great to have a president support the hat industry. It would create jobs.”
     It was nearly a century ago that Coco Chanel began building a retailing fortune by designing and selling hats while fashioning an elaborate biography for herself to better publicize her wares. Hats off to the tradition of innovative guerilla marketing!

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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