Lola Ehrlich of Lola Hats has a clear knack for millinery. As soon as she opened up her first shop, she was sold out of everything. Not only that, Begdorf Goodman was begging to buy from her and she had a hat on the cover of Elle. That was in 1989, and she’s been going strong ever since. These days her studio is in Bushwick, in the GMDC building. Everything is designed and hand-made right here.
When did you start making hats?
I started when I was really young. I was married, and I was kind of a kept wife – I didn’t do anything. I was living in London, at the time. I was very bored, and my husband said, “Why don’t you take some night classes? You might enjoy it.”
So I took a fencing class, an archery class, and a hat-making class. I couldn’t fence for the life of me. I was so passive that I would always retreat. I was also very bad at archery – I was so weak that I couldn’t string my bow. In those days they were still wood, and you had to push them down very hard. I couldn’t do it. But I excelled in the millinery class. I was really, really good. So I said, “OK, that’s it, I’m going to be a milliner!”
And then life took really wild, wacky turns. My husband died. I moved to the United States. Then I had to support myself. So I didn’t think about making hats much, all of these years. But I always wore hats. Then when I turned 40 I thought, “What the hell, you have one chance in life to do what you really want to do.” I decided, OK, I’m going to make hats. I had a really cushy job with lots of great benefits, and people thought I was out of my mind when I quit!
How did you start your company?
In those days the East Village was really the happening spot, so I rented a tiny little storefront there. I’d had a full-time job up to that point, so I’d only made like 6 hats. And when I opened, I sold out of them immediately. I thought I was a great success – I’d sold 100% of my inventory! So I made more hats, and this is how it started going.
I have no formal training. I’ve never gone to school for anything. Even as a kid, I never went to kindergarten or grammar school or middle school or college. My parents were very radical and decided not to send the kids to school. So I have no sense of business, math, anything. I learned everything by doing it.
That’s amazing!
I think it’s pretty cool, in some ways. But it’s been difficult. If I had known how hard it was going to be, I would never have gone into business. People said, “Do you have a five-year plan? What’s your strategy? Have you done market research?” I never did any of that. I just opened, and I thought, “Well, if it fails I’ll do something else!” I think that’s the only way to go. Once you’re completely immersed in it, you can’t stop!
How did it evolve?
More and more people started coming to the store. Stylists came to borrow hats for fashion shoots. And then designers came, asking me to make hats for their runway shows. I started feeling overwhelmed and hiring students to help me. Then Bergdorf Goodman asked me to make hats for them. I turned them down; I didn’t want to get involved in anything that big! I just wanted to sit in my store and make my hats! They kept asking, so finally I gave in.
It became so much work that I had to close the shop. That was the only way I could make enough hats to fill the orders. I decided to take a space next door, turn it into a studio, and hire more assistants. It started rolling by itself.
What is your studio like now?
I design 4 collections a year, 2 for men and 2 for women. And then I do special projects for whomever asks me. Some companies might ask me to design a couple hats for them – Nike, or The Gap, or whoever. And for the rest of the time I just deal with financial stuff. That’s really my job, these days. The minute your business is viable, you start thinking about money instead of doing what you love. I find it incredibly frustrating.
I don’t make the hats anymore. I design every hat – I come up with the original idea and I make the prototype, but then I hand it off. I have a great staff. Some of the people have worked for me for more than 10 years. We make pretty much everything.
It’s incredible that everything is made here in Brooklyn.
The reason we do it all in-house is because there’s no one else who can produce things like this. There used to be – there’s a city upstate called Gloverville that had dozens of factories that just made gloves. And there were factories that made hats. But all of them closed down in the ’60s when the fashions changed, and not everybody wore hats and gloves anymore. Now the skill for making those things is gone. There are a couple hat factories left in New Jersey, but they make horrible, industrial things that are stamped out like cookies and have no life.
How did you end up in this studio space, in the GMDC?
I have a friend who makes fine jewelry, and her husband is an iron-worker. He made the stairway at MoMA, for instance. He was looking for a place to move his shop and he visited the GMDC building. His wife told me about how cool this place was. I came to look at it and thought it was fantastic. I love that they’re supporting craftsmen and artisans. Previously, I had a very nice studio in the Garment District, with very cheap rent. But when the lease ended the rent went from $9 a square foot to $42 a square foot, so I had to get out.
We’ve made these little showrooms here, one for the men’s hats and one for the women’s hats. But sometimes it’s hard to get people to come here. The buyers for “The Majors” – Bergdorf’s, Saks, Nieman’s, Barney’s, all those places – they won’t come to Brooklyn. They’ve never been in Brooklyn! The foreign buyers love it, though. They have heard of Bushwick, so they trek all the way out here and take lots of pictures!
