Big hat guy

“So I’m a big hat guy. I sleep in hats. I shower in hats,” Curtis Crow deadpanned. “But, literally, like, I wear hats all the time. So much so it is to the point that when I don’t have a hat on, people think it’s weird.”

The 27-year-old picked up the habit circuitously. A comb barely touched his hair in high school.

“I would always shower of a night, and when I’d wake up in the morning, I’d just go to school,” Curtis said. “I’d look like a complete goofball.”

He was oblivious to it at the time, but, in college, the goofball image had to go.

“All of a sudden, things change, right,” he said. “You are on the market, and you’re trying to impress people.”

A friend suggested he put some stuff in his hair to manage it a bit. “So, I did, and it was pretty decent,” he admitted.

Neither perfectly coiffed hair nor the structured studies of college life agreed with Curtis’ personality. Those two items were not on his checklist of future aspirations of success. He dropped out of college and came home to work on his entrepreneurial ambitions in media production. The daily dippy-do was dropped, and the hats returned to their proper position on top of his mop.

Now, the permanent indentation crowning his head is almost as much a signature as his hats are in his growing media production company, Crowbird Creative.

“I spend a lot more time every morning picking my hat than I do picking my shirt,” he joked.

He’s been building Crowbird Creative since 2017 and now works for several local companies producing digital content, videos and podcasts.

Curtis is goal-oriented and driven. In 2021, with his successful single-person outfit growing, Curtis began to consider another venture. “One of my goals for 2021 was to start a printing company,” he explained.

He decided to teach himself how to use a heat press to make t-shirts. “I bought a cheap heat press on Amazon,” he said. “I kinda played around with this idea to make apparel. I made some shirts for myself and some shirts for some other people, and honestly, I hated it.”

The press had a few other attachments, though. One was a hat press.

“I needed some hats for myself, so I hooked it up,” Curtis said.

He had ordered a couple of patches from an Etsy store, and he began to learn how to use the heat press to attach them to hats.

“I made a couple hats. I was pretty happy with them, and I posted them on Instagram,” he explained.

The hats featured his Crowbird Creative logo, and they garnered some interest from his followers. To his surprise, some people even asked to buy the branded hats.

“I was like, ‘that’s cool, that’s a nice advertisement,'” he said. “But then someone reached out and asked if I could make five or six custom hats for their business.”

It snowballed from there.

“Naturally, as an entrepreneur, my mind immediately went to how do I scale this from just making a couple hats for myself and the few people interested in them,” Curtis said.

Just like he had done with his media production company, he dove into the processes and taught himself the ins and outs of creating the hats now featured on his new company’s website and in his shop on 14th Street in Jasper.

Along the way, there were casualties. He burned up a few of the cheap heat presses — once during a disastrous run of hats for his first big client — before he took the leap of investing in an industrial machine rather than the hobbyist ones.

He also has a hat graveyard for all the ruined samples he went through in the learning process.

With the investment in the proper equipment, Curtis decided to make it a proper company. He finished the website for Old Crow Apparel while his wife, Miranda, was in labor with the couple’s second child. Remi was born on October 27, 2021, and the new company became a reality a few days later.

“That was a terrible time to make a decision like that, but I quit my job to go full time with Crowbird right before our first child (Jensen) was born,” he said. “So, I think every time we have a kid, I’ll just start a new business.”

“We’re done having kids,” he added quickly. “So, maybe we’re done with new businesses.”

As he’s grown, Curtis has moved to local sources for patches. He now works with Crystal Water Designs to have the patches made in Jasper rather than an online source. He sources the blank hats from just about anywhere he can find them since, just like most industries, global shipping issues make them hard to find right now.

His workshop is set up in the basement of his Huntingburg home. He spends his days working with clients on their digital media production needs, and then after the kids are in bed, he heads down, kicks on his 20-hour-long playlist of bluegrass music, and hammers out hats until midnight for either his enjoyment or for his growing list of clients.

A conversation and a bold bit of outreach have also landed him a great connection. He is a big fan of standup comedy. “It’s something I want to try someday,” he admitted. “I’ve got a note on my phone full of gobs of material that I’ve been working on for years.”

He’s a big fan of Dusty Slay. After attending one of Dusty’s shows in Nashville, Curtis and the comedian found some commonality in their love of hats. “I bought a couple of his hats, and he complimented me on my hat,” he said. “And we talked for a bit.”

Curtis felt like there was a hat connection between them, so he reached out to Dusty through Instagram to see if he would be interested in working together.

The comedian was interested. Frantically, Curtis ripped through a bunch of designs until Dusty found one he liked. Curtis doesn’t know if the connection will lead to anything significant but just being able to work with one of his favorite comedians is worth the hard work.

Dusty might show up on stage with some of Curtis’ work on his head sometime in the future, and for Curtis, that makes it all worth it. While he’s great at creating beautiful digital content for Crowbird Creative, he’s found a different kind of joy in using those design talents and new skills to create a signature product — one that he loves and uses every day.

You can follow and order customs hats from Old Crow Apparel on Instagram, Facebook, and at OldCrowApparel.com. You can order hats directly here.

The Dubois County Chamber of Commerce is also hosting a business break at the shop located at 107 East 14th Street in Jasper on February 18 from 8 to 9 a.m.