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About Us
THINKING CAPS TO WIDE-BRIMMED HATS
by Lindsay DeLong
Peter Grimm Neidermeyer started making hats so his friends
would stop getting sunburned. Well sort of. The hat
revelation hit him one day while sitting on a Southern
Californian beach, surrounded by sun burnt friends. Always
the entrepreneur since his college days in Oregon when he
ordered hundreds of canvas sandals from Italy only to find
he had ordered them far too small for the big footed
Oregonians, the determined Grimm decided to try his hand at
business again and headed south to Mexico to see what he
could find.
This is where the hat business found Peter Grimm. It was
1989; he was 26. Grimm returned to the states with an old
station wagon full of wide brimmed straw hats. He gave the
hats to his sore and burnt friends and went to the nearby
beach shops to sell himself: “We’re all wearing these
hats—put them in your stores.” His simple plan worked and
the “wide brimmed hat” was a hit.
A hit so big that Grimm’s first major customers were cities
and counties who would buy the hats in bulk for their
lifeguards. “It’s now the industry term for lifeguard hat…
it’s like aspirin… it’s generic… every hat company in the
world knows it,” says Grimm.
His trips to Tijuana became regular events, and when Grimm
ran into trouble with customs he’d hand over a twenty and be
back in business—a business that was now booming-- Grimm had
started giving the hats touches of his own.
Grimm’s two roommates who shared a house with him in Pacific
Beach decided to quit their jobs and work full time for him.
Their jobs consisted of going out to find different fabrics
and coming back to trim them into “something fun.” That’s
why Peter Grimm’s strategy was so embraced. That’s why his
strategy felt so right—something so simple… “We take a hat
and do something different to it.”
16 years after the formation of his company, Grimm’s
original motto continues to work effectively as his business
has grown to its present-day enormity. Going from a tiny
apartment in PB to a 43,000 square foot warehouse in San
Marcos is a huge deal. Nowadays, everyone wears Grimm’s hats
from Eva Longoria, to Vanilla Ice, to Bono from U2 who is
reported to love his hats so much that he books an extra
seat in first class when he flies so as not to scrunch them.
“You know you’re a leader when all the other hat companies
are following,” says Grimm. For example, when Trucker hats
were selling like hotcakes and lacked a certain, necessary
style, Grimm simply took a generic Grimm trucker hat and
“walked outside, rubbed it on the cement and whacked it on
the forklift chain.” He then took it to the trade show and
watched it become a hit—“a hit for everyone,” laughs Grimm,
“except for the girls who worked for me who hated it because
they would continuously break their nails.”
“People like the hats that look real and distressed—the hat
for years look,” he says. And Peter Grimm knows what people
like.
Lindsay DeLong
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