Our story

Hats woven for weather, not for a photo

FURTALK started in 2012 and has been making hats, beanies, scarves and gloves ever since. This site is the catalogue of what we currently weave. The buying happens on the shelf we keep with our retail partner, not here.

What we put on the loom

Paper straw for the months when shade is the whole point of a hat, knitted yarn for the months when your ears go numb, cotton and linen for everything in between. We pick the fibre for the job the hat has to do, which is why a summer brim and a winter beanie from us feel nothing alike in the hand.

Right now that comes to a catalogue you can count. Nothing on this site is a placeholder or a coming soon.

Where the work happens

Design, sampling and production sit together in Nanjing, which is unusual enough to be worth saying. The person who decides how deep a crown should be can walk to the machine that knits it, so a change takes days instead of a season. Our US mail comes to a showroom building in the Los Angeles fashion district, and that is all that address is for.

Why this catalogue does not take your money

We are hat makers, not shopkeepers. Payment, packing and sending are handled by our retail partner, who has done it for years and is better at it than we would be. What we do here is describe our own work properly: what a hat is woven from, what weather it was built for, how it wants to be washed.

One consequence is worth knowing before you read a price on this site. The number is copied from our partner’s listing and it moves without warning us. Treat it as a guide and trust the figure you see when you get there.

What the tagline is doing there

Let’s talk kindness. It reads soft, and we nearly cut it for that reason, but it is a working instruction rather than a slogan. It means we would rather send a hat that lasts four winters than four hats that last one, and it means we will tell you on a hat’s own page when it is hand wash only, even though nobody enjoys reading that.

It also means we stop short of claims we cannot stand behind. Where a label gives a number we print the number. Where it does not, we say so and leave it alone.

Letters, not parcels

Our US address takes post and nothing else.

This is our studio address, not a shop. There is nothing to try on here, no counter, and no parcels to send back to it.