Inside a workshop of stone and corrugated metal in Garden City on Greeley’s south edge, hats rise in soft stacks toward the rafters. Felt bodies lie flat on workbenches waiting for steam. Others rest over wooden blocks. Crown shapes line the shelves in neat rows: cattleman, pinch-front, Fort Worth, telescope. Brims curl, dip and flare in every direction.

At Greeley Hat Works, the smell of wet felt hangs in the air. Steam hisses. Old Parisienne tools sit within arm’s reach.

Trent Johnson has run Greeley Hat Works since 1996, the fourth owner in a line that goes back to 1909. He jokes he’s been accused of “setting the industry back 100 years.” He takes it as a compliment.

Johnson has been collecting hats since he was a boy. While other kids traded baseball cards, he paid attention to caps and brims, interested in what they said about the people who wore them. In 1982, he saved his money and bought hats from different countries at Disney’s newly opened Epcot: a fez from Morocco, a beret from France. “I didn’t choose the hat life,” he said. “The hat life chose me.”

While studying business at the University of Northern Colorado, Johnson worked on the family ranch of Susie Orr, then owner of Greeley Hat Works. When the chores were done, he would wander into her workshop, studying hat blocks and steamers the way others study fine art. By 1993, he was Orr’s apprentice. Three years later, at 25, he bought the shop.

The business had already lived several lives. Founded in 1909 as The Shining Parlor, it grew into a hat shop and shining parlor in the 1920s, weathered shifts in Western fashion and was revived under Orr in the 1980s. When Johnson took over, he became the fourth keeper of a century-old tradition rooted in Greeley.

 

VERY LITTLE HAS changed about how the hats are made – other than how many leave the shop. As an apprentice, Johnson built 60 hats in a year. Today, with a team of 20, Greeley Hat Works produces thousands annually, along with wholesale orders for stores across the country and overseas. But Johnson still refuses to grow so fast that the work slips.

The tools, methods and philosophy remain old-school. Johnson proudly calls himself “retro-tech,” relying on traditional Parisienne hat-making tools built between 1850-1940. During a custom fitting, the client settles into a black, leather-backed barber chair. Johnson maps the exact contours of the customer’s head using a French conformateur, a device that looks like a top hat fitted with folding metal fingers. A formillion translates that pattern into the shape of a block. The shop keeps files and head patterns for clients dating back years.

Then begins the real work: wetting, steaming, shaping and letting the felt rest. A custom hat may take 10-12 hours of labor spread across time. Some are made from European fur blends. Others use 100% pure beaver belly hair, the gold standard of hat making. Whether a customer buys a fully custom hat or one off the shelf, Johnson takes care in the same details: the color, the hatband, the liner and the sweatband.

Johnson’s craft lies not just in making hats but in helping people find the right one, balancing a customer’s vision with the candid honesty of his 30 years at the bench. “It’s all about getting to know the client,” he said. “The most important part of designing a hat is listening.” Will it be used for ranch work, rodeo or a music festival? Does the client want a fedora-style-pencil roll or a wide buckaroo brim? Understated dignity or full-on swagger? From there, he tweaks the hat until it fits both the head and the life that comes with it.

The hands-on approach helped propel Greeley Hat Works. In 1998, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association ordered 100 all-beaver hats for its 100th anniversary, a job that brought the shop national attention. Since 2002, Johnson has made hats for President George W. Bush. His work has also appeared on Jeremy Renner in Wind River and on members of the Yellowstone cast. Johnson spent weeks with cast members and getting to know them so each hat matched the character.

 

DESPITE THE CELEBRITY clients, the core of Greeley Hat Works has never shifted. “They’re salt of the earth, real people who appreciate craftsmanship,” Johnson said. “I don’t care if you’re a feedlot cowboy, a hand surgeon or a secretary. You get the same experience from me.”

His clientele includes farmers, ranchers, cattlemen, horsewomen and ag workers, along with newer customers discovering the West in their own way. He doesn’t build “costumes,” as he puts it. He builds hats that fit a life, not a stereotype.

Some customer files go back decades. Rodney Chapman is a feedlot cowboy whose daily hat, made from pure beaver hair, lasted 13 years of sun, dirt and sweat before he needed another. “Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, I don’t build him a lot of hats,” Johnson said with a laugh.

For someone who makes thousands of hats a year, Johnson keeps his own collection modest. He rotates just four: a traditional wide-brim Western, a Johnson County style, a fedora and a well-worn work hat. More than once, he has sold the hat straight off his head when a customer falls in love with it.

Johnson is quick with hat lore and trivia. He tells about John B. Stetson, who came to Colorado in 1853 for the dry air. As the story goes, Stetson trapped and skinned a beaver near the base of Pikes Peak, fashioned a rough felt shell and sold it on the spot to a passing cowboy for $10 – anchoring Colorado as the birthplace of the first true cowboy hat. Indigenous practices of stacking, which inspired ribbons and beads wrapped around hats in the 1800s, are also part of that history.

His shop slogan, “Still Western. Since 1909,” fits the way he talks about his work: integrity, dedication and honoring your word.

“It all comes back to the American West and wanting to do the best you can – for the land, for the customer,” Johnson said. “We’re okay if that takes more time.”

On any given day, Johnson works between stacks of felt bodies and shelves of blocks, taking one unfinished hat after another back to the bench. He stretches felt over the block, leans into the steam and works the brim by hand, the way Greeley hatters have since 1909.