Stormy Kromer: How a Simple Hat Became an Icon

​There is no hat more synonymous with the Northwoods than the venerable Stormy Kromer. It’s not just that it’s wool and warm, that it keeps the sun out of your eyes but with a brim that doesn’t get in the way of things like binoculars or rifle sights or a bowstring, and its iconic flap that can be tightened to prevent blowing off on a windy day – its original purpose – or pulled down to cover your ears when it’s cold. It’s more than the sum of its functional parts; it’s the icon of people who do outdoor things in the Northwoods or wish they could.

If you have a Stormy Kromer cap, then you know the story of how semi-professional baseball player and railroad worker George “Stormy” Kromer asked his wife Ida to sew a flap around his cap to keep it from blowing off in the wind in 1903: the story is sewn into the inside of the cap. But the most interesting story of the Stormy Kromer isn’t this simple design feature; it’s how the hat was saved by a little sewing shop in Ironwood, Michigan, and how the Stormy Kromer brand grew from a simple cap into an icon of the Northwoods.

Last month, I sat down with Bob Jacquart, Chairman and recently-retired CEO of Stormy Kromer and its parent company, Jacquart Fabric Products, to learn about how this simple cap became the icon it is today and what lies ahead for the growing company. Just days earlier he had received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Michigan Manufacturers Association for the story he was about to tell me.

​Before we get to that story, though, I think the setting was telling.

Jacquart met me at my family’s lake cabin east of Ironwood on the day before the firearm deer season opener; my cousins and I were using it for deer camp. Another camp sits just up the hill from us and with the snowy conditions, I suggested that he park up on the road rather than risk getting stuck in our unplowed drive. On the walk down to our cabin, a member of the other deer camp greeted him – having grown up in Ironwood, they knew each other – and he showed Jacquart the canvas rucksack he still used for deer hunting that Jacquart Fabric Products had made in the 1970’s.

“I probably sewed that,” Jacquart said. “That’s No. 8 canvas duck,” he told me later during the interview, “olive drab, shade 7.” The deer camp member said that Jacquart Fabric Products also custom sewed canvas deer blinds for frames that his dad had made. Before we even began the interview, this interaction helped me understand both the deep roots that Jacquart Fabric Products had in the Ironwood community and its own legacy of manufacturing outdoor gear even before it made Stormy Kromer caps, as well as the durability and quality of the products it made.

Jacquart Fabric Products was founded in Ironwood in 1958 by Jacquart’s father, Robert, in his basement as a side project making deposit bags during his off days as a fireman. He grew it into a full-time business and moved it into a small building in Ironwood, where they took custom heavy-duty sewing orders and produced their own products: the backpacks and custom canvas hunting blinds are examples of this. Still today, Jacquart Fabric Products manufactures boat, vehicle, ATV/ORV and accessory covers, dog beds, motorcycle seats, and custom products for a variety of manufacturers like St. Croix Rods, Boss Snowplows, canopies for Rainbow Playsystems, and light-weight canvas tents for SnowTrekker, including a Stormy Kromer-branded canvas portable sauna tent.

In 2001, the Ironwood Kromer cap dealer mentioned to Jacquart that “Kromers” as they were known then, were going to be discontinued. They had been manufactured by the Kromer Cap Company in Milwaukee since their founding in 1903, coming only in black and red, but their sales were declining and the family that made Kromer caps decided to discontinue them (they also produced brightly-colored cotton welder’s caps that they would continue).

At this time, the Kromer caps might have gone the way of other distinctive outdoor hat styles of the 20th Century, like the Jones cap: visible only in black and white and faded Polaroid mid-century photos of grandpa’s old deer camp. Jacquart asked to be put in touch with the Kromer Cap Company and offered to buy the rights to manufacture the caps. In addition to loving the hat, he also saw an opportunity to provide some of his seasonal contract sewers with local full-time jobs in Ironwood.

“The problem is that 80% of the sales are in a 20-mile radius around where you’re sitting,” they told him, referring to Ironwood. “You’re never going to make anything of it.”

Jacquart was undaunted: he just wanted to make the hat. His biggest worry was doing right by the
family he was buying them from. He bought the rights to manufacture the Kromer cap, but his original agreement did not include the rights to use the Kromer name.
Something funny happened, he told me. “The lady who ran our 4-H program came up to me and asked, ‘Are Kromer hats really made in my hometown?’” She then showed him a picture of a grave marker on Isle Royale where her husband’s Kromer was buried at his favorite fishing spot.

“I started to wonder, am I missing something?” Jacquart relayed. “Is there more to this hat than I
realized?”

He went to Milwaukee to interview marketing agencies to help brand and market the new old hat,
armed with a picture of Stormy and Ida Kromer in 1914 and a picture of Jacquart’s grandpa, who worked for the same railroad as Stormy Kromer, holding a 28-inch walleye and wearing a Kromer cap.

“You don’t have a clue what you’ve got here,” they told him. From a marketing standpoint, if they made this hat new today, they could never have that history. They showed him an artist’s rendering of the hat with the story inside and the signature on the back.

“Let’s make this the hat with the story,” they told him.

But Jacquart told them that he didn’t have the rights to the name. They were incredulous “All you have is the name!”

He went back and got the naming rights. To distinguish the hats from the colorful Kromer welder’s caps, though, they decided to call them “Stormy Kromer” caps, and the brand we now associate with the caps was (re-)born.

About seven years later, Jacquart said, an older man came into the shop and said, “I used to work with Stormy Kromer, does anyone want to know where he got his name?” Apparently, George “Stormy” Kromer had a temper and when his co-workers saw him coming, they’d wonder “how bad will the storm be today?”

“There was such a learning curve for us,” Jacquart said about trying to get his hats in stores. He started calling up the stores that he really liked and asked for their favorite manufacturer sales reps, and he hired them to get his caps in the stores. Stormy Kromer also got a boost in sales when it was stocked at Cabela’s, which helped the sales of their Rancher cap, as well as when an outdoor photographer used Stormy Kromer caps in shoots for Field & Stream. But that just got the hat in front of people.

“The simple thing is that it’s just a great hat,” Jacquart said.

It wasn’t just a great hat that earned Bob Jacquart the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Michigan Manufacturers Association in November, though.

“What we have at our place are a bunch of people who are really good craftsmen. That’s who we are. We’re makers,” he said proudly, but at the same time humbly. “Then all of the sudden the U.P. adopted us. But then when they adopted us (he points to a map of the whole state of Michigan), we really blew up.”

He got very reflective for a moment.

“You know, I can tell stories all day long but when I’m riding around in my car thinking about that award, it’s probably the most special thing that I could get as a businessman.”

The goal for the future of Stormy Kromer remains simple, if not easy: keep making great caps and put them on the heads of more people.

“We have so much opportunity, so much territory where we haven’t grown, so making Stormy Kromer as well known in the upper half of the United States as it is in Michigan is the continued goal for the next 10 years,” he said, as well as building out their summer line.

Last year, Jacquart retired as the CEO of Stormy Kromer, but remains as chairman of the board. His daughter Gina Jacquart Thorsen took over formally as CEO; she has served as President of the company for the past decade.

Jacquart now spends his time advising both of his daughters who work at the company, cycling, giving factory tours, and reviving the Copper Peak Ski Jump near Ironwood. He helped secure a $20 million grant to update the ski jump so that it can host International Ski & Snowboard Federation (FIS) ski jumping competitions, bringing an international spotlight to the western Upper Peninsula.

Amidst retirement, awards, growing a nationally-recognized brand, and bringing an international ski competition to his hometown, Jacquart remains what he has always been.

“I’m the sewing guy. In fact, we had an embroidery problem today so Gina asked me to help solve it.”

In just over twenty years, Jacquart Fabric Products has turned Stormy Kromer into a household name. Even Jeff Daniels, the Michigan-born actor, was wearing one on the Detroit Lions pregame show this Thanksgiving.
​
Jacquart’s explanation for this is simple.

“We lucked out, and then did the right things with it.”

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