Straw & origin

All 40 items in this catalogue carry two lines that are never optional: the straw the hat is woven from, and the place the braid was actually woven, followed by the place it was blocked. Both appear on the product page, above the price and again in the specification table.

We publish the weaving origin rather than only the country of final finishing, because the finishing is the shorter part of the story. A hat blocked in Spain from a braid woven in Madagascar is described exactly that way.

If a record is missing either line, it does not go on sale. That is enforced by a check that runs every time this site is built, not by someone remembering to look.

This is the single most misused name in the straw hat trade, so we are going to be precise about it.

The Ecuadorian article is woven by hand from paja toquilla, in Ecuador, and the craft is inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. It takes weeks to make and it is one of the great achievements of textile work. We do not sell it and we have never claimed to.

What we sell under the name Panama-style is a crown and brim shape: a centre dent or a single ridge, a proportioned brim, an ivory fine weave. Ours are woven in Cebu, in the Philippines, from a fine straw that is not paja toquilla, and blocked in Gata de Gorgos, Alicante.

We therefore never present our hats as the Ecuadorian craft, and we never attach a protected Ecuadorian place name to them. Where a shape has a place-name association, the product page states the real origin in the same breath as the shape.

Straw braid is produced on a braiding machine and then coiled and stitched into the shape of a hat. The blocking — pulling the crown down over a wooden block, setting the dent or the ridge, and finishing the brim — is done by hand in our workshop.

So the accurate description of everything in this catalogue is: machine-woven straw braid, hand-blocked. That is the phrase used on every product page, and it is the phrase we would use if you asked us in person.

We do not describe our hats as made by hand, because a machine makes the braid. If a product woven entirely by hand ever enters the range, it will say so on its own page and we will be able to show you where it was woven and by whom.

Once a hat is sold with a claim about protecting you from solar radiation, it stops being headwear in the regulatory sense and becomes personal protective equipment, with everything that entails: testing, certification, a declaration of conformity, technical documentation.

We do not sell our hats as protective equipment, so we make no claim of that kind anywhere on this site, in any language.

What we do instead is photograph each braid backlit, print how much daylight passes through it, and let you compare. A raffia braid shows open gaps. A fine weave shows pinpricks. Both are true statements about the material, and you can see them for yourself rather than take our word for it.

That is the whole reason the weave explorer exists, and the reason the three cards at the top of the home page are photographs of light coming through braid.

Because it depends on the material, this distinction belongs on this page as well as on the guarantee page, and it is worded the same way in both places.

Natural behaviour of straw, described on every product page before you buy, and not a defect:

• Cracking after dry heat — a hat left in a parked car becoming brittle and splitting along the braid.
• Fading over a season in the sun, unevenly where one side was exposed more.
• A brim that has waved after rain, or a crown that has softened under pressure.
• Gaps in the weave, in the amount described on that hat's page.

Lack of conformity, covered by the three-year legal guarantee:

• Braid unravelling or coil stitching coming apart in normal use.
• A sweatband lifting away from the crown.
• A brim failing at its structure rather than softening at its surface.
• A crown separating from the brim.

Where a hat has a leather sweatband, the leather is tested to a chromium VI content of 3 mg/kg or less, and the product page states it. Every other sweatband we fit is cotton twill.

Straw is not dyed on the parts that sit against the forehead. Where a hat has a dyed band worked into the braid, the dye is on the outer surface of the crown.