Stetson “Made of America”
Website & Community, 2010
- Role
- Senior designer — platform design & product strategy
- Relationship
- Partnered directly with the CEO of Stetson on the “Made of America” mandate
- Target
- Modernize a 150-year-old American brand on the web — flagship site, full product catalog, and a community where the public writes its own Stetson stories
- Constraints
- 2008–2010 · a heritage brand with a CEO mandate and committees downstream of it · one senior designer on the platform · catalog spanning hats, boots, apparel, eyewear and fragrance
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye — platform design and product strategy, at Big Fuel, partnered with the CEO of Stetson
- Time-to-dispatch
- Design 2008–’09; Women's Wear Daily front page January 28, 2010; the new stetson.com live that October
- Result
- A photo-mosaic flagship, a complete catalog, and The Exchange — a leather-journal community with membership, story writing, featured spreads and a full-bleed story wall, built under John B. Stetson's own standard: make things right, and the best they can be
- Principal
- Stetson — via Big Fuel, New York
- 150 years brand age at the time of the rebuildSource ›
- WWD front page press, Jan 28 2010Archival · 2008–2010
- “Stetson's Hat Tricks” the era's context, Forbes Mar 2009Source ›
Pictured above in the Stetson online shop: The Diamante — genuine beaver & chinchilla, 14K gold buckle set with 26 diamonds, MSRP $5,999
The Diamante’s tagline is a personal favorite: “It’s a hat. Yeah, and the Tetons are just a hill.” The catalog carried the same materiality — product carousels on tooled-leather bands, seasonal lookbook polaroids, and detail pages worthy of the flagship product.
Every Stetson has a story. The Exchange — the community at the heart of this design — collected them in a weathered leather journal.
WHERE: Big Fuel, New York City
DATE: 2009–2010
Partnered with the CEO of Stetson to revamp the brand — “Made of America” — with a modern, dynamic web platform. The design: a photo-mosaic homepage where product, heritage, and the public’s own stories share one wall; a complete catalog across hats, boots, apparel, eyewear, and fragrance; and The Exchange, a membership community where anyone could write their Stetson story into an open leather journal, under John B. Stetson’s own standard: “Make things right, and the best they can be.”
What got made
The Exchange was designed end to end: splash, signup (the form asked for your favorite TV show and your MySpace — it was 2009), story writing and editing, a featured-story spread with paperclipped polaroids (“Love at First Stetson — Omaha, NE”), and a full-bleed mosaic wall of every story submitted. Featured writers could win a $500 Stetson wardrobe.
The record
Design began during the Big Fuel tenure (summer ‘08–‘09); the press comps carry a Women’s Wear Daily front page dated January 28, 2010, and the new stetson.com was live by that October. Some Exchange screens still wear their lorem ipsum — these are the design comps, preserved: the work as it was imagined, before committees got their turn.
That tenure is in this portfolio too — three years at Big Fuel, the same stretch that produced a national Department of Justice PSA. A heritage brand and a federal client inside three years is a useful description of what that agency actually was.
From the manifesto: a real person made this — on purpose. The brief was heritage; the design’s bet was that heritage lives in first-person stories, not stock photography. Give people a journal and a standard to write against, and the brand tells itself.
Proof: stetson.com today · the era’s context: Forbes, “Stetson’s Hat Tricks” (March 2009), on the CEO’s push to modernize the 150-year-old brand.
