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One’s based in Kiev, Ukraine; the other in Kent, England. However, both Ruslan Baginskiy and Emma Brewin are shaking up the hat category with modern luxury pieces that are trending worldwide.
Ten years ago, mention of luxury hats might have conjured royal weddings or sculptural runway pieces from veteran creatives Stephen Jones or Philip Treacy. In recent years, however, a swathe of young milliners, led by the likes of Baginskiy and Brewin, has injected an ultra-modern edge to hats with recognisable signature styles that endure season-to-season.
Both milliners saw a dramatic uplift in sales during 2020 (Baginskiy alone recorded a 500 per cent uptick, according to the brand) — in a year when sales in the overall luxury market contracted by 23 per cent, according to Bain & Company. The total global hat market declined 19 per cent to an estimated $1.3 billion from 2019-2020 according to Euromonitor International research, as seen by Vogue Business. It’s expected to rebound 14 per cent to $1.5 billion in 2021.
While Baginskiy and Brewin sidestepped pandemic declines, their pace of growth has brought unique challenges in production, HR and marketing. With relatively few luxury hat brands in the market, both designers operate to their own blueprint for building their businesses.
Ruslan Baginskiy launched his hat brand in 2015 with $200 in his bank account. “It’s like a Madonna story,” he says, “I had nothing.” Today, his edgy baker boys and berets are stocked in 200-plus retailers across 27 countries including Matchesfashion, Neiman Marcus and Moda Operandi, where the brand first sold via a trunk show in 2016. After the extraordinary surge in 2019-20, Baginskiy’s business is still growing, doubling sales from 2020-2021.
Brewin’s oversized fluffy bucket hat was the 10th hottest item in the world in Q3 2021, according to fashion shopping platform Lyst, boosted by endorsement from celebrities ranging from Rihanna to Dua Lipa. The brand hit 101 per cent growth from 2019-2020 but as orders mounted up, Brewin pulled back from wholesale in 2021 to regain control over the production cycles, according to the company. Sales still grew by 193 per cent from 2020-2021.
Luxury hats are trending upwards on resale platforms. During the first two weeks of November, Vestiaire Collective saw searches in the hats category increase by 26 per cent. Specifically, in the women’s category this increase was 29 per cent, with popular styles including baseball caps from Gucci, Prada and Burberry.
After graduating from University for the Creative Arts Rochester, England, Brewin was managing a charity shop when she made her first hat in 2016 for a night out. Soon after, she started selling hats online. British model Adwoa Aboah bought one to wear at Glastonbury. In 2018, Net-a-Porter placed an order, soon followed by Browns, The Webster and Selfridges, which stocked the label until she stepped back from wholesale in 2021.
“I decided to not do wholesale because there were so many shops that wanted to stock my stuff,” she says. “It was really hard to manage what I could physically do — and go to all the stores I wanted to go to.” Her hats retail from £320-£470. There’s a waitlist, which she was upping from two-to-three to three-to-four weeks on the day she spoke to Vogue Business, coping with a flood of pre-Christmas orders.
Wholesale represented 90 per cent of Baginskiy’s business before the pandemic, the designer says. “During lockdown we began to actively develop direct-to-consumer. We launched e-commerce and relaunched a flagship store in Kiev. Now, direct sales are 40 per cent and continue to grow.”
The designer still sees value in both channels to fulfill his ambition to become the biggest hat brand in the world. “We built a brand before we built a company,” he says. “Now we need to work hard to meet the orders.” As sales surge in China, he plans to hire 100 people over the next year.
Local production and the importance of handmade
Hat production is very specific and time-consuming, Baginskiy and Brewin agree. Every Emma Brewin hat is made-to-order, handsewn and brushed — a process that the designer intends to maintain even as sales grow. It can take six to seven hours to make a single piece, Brewin says.
She insists she will never use a factory to make her hats. That gives her brand a special appeal, she argues. “I think people want to buy stuff that's handmade, and I think it's very clear that it's handmade on my site,” she says. “I feel that when you're buying through a store, people sometimes assume it’s made in a factory. Sometimes I get an email from a customer who thinks a hat can be shipped the next day, but when I explain to them that it takes two to three weeks to be made for them, they're just so chuffed [pleased].”
The designer isn’t opposed to the idea of wholesale. “But it would still always be with my supervision,” she adds. “Sometimes I think it really spoils brands when they get too big.”
Baginskiy says he is proud to create jobs in his hometown of Kiev as his company scales, but finding talent has been a real challenge. Now, he trains young people with no experience in millinery to boost creative industries in Ukraine and has ambitions to run a university course in millinery locally one day.
“With our business model, we cannot outsource the production,” he says. “We have a large number of styles. We use a lot of hand techniques and embroidery. We are trying to be very flexible in terms of production times, so we had to build a huge production operation for our partners to meet orders.” As well as an in-house team of 80, Baginskiy works with local artisans, who provide the wood blocks for modelling straw and felt hats.
Despite the scale of his brand, Baginskiy makes sure all the team shares his values. “This helps to achieve a better result,” he says. “My friends and family work with me and I trust them. I think it's normal to build companies like this today. Many fashion brands are losing their soul.”
Endorsements boost brand recognition
Brewin rarely gifts her hats, but can see the direct effect on sales and site traffic when celebrities choose to wear them. However, it can be tricky if Instagram posts aren’t credited. “If you’re tagged on Instagram, it directly affects you and it’s so good. But if not, it can get a bit lost,” she says.
Brewin says she has only had one hat returned because it didn’t fit, and online feedback is uniformly positive. Brewin stands by the use of plastic faux fur as her choice of material. “Every hat is made-to-order, there’s no waste products at all. Even the scraps are used to make my earrings,” she says. No stock is saved. “I don’t even prepare for the winter,” she says, “I get too stressed about being left with any stock!”
For Baginskiy, producing and sourcing in Kiev is cheaper than in Italy or France but it has its drawbacks. “It’s not so easy. When you live in Paris or New York, you have more opportunities to work with cool designers and magazines,” he says. The brand will open a boutique in Paris over the next two or three years to feel closer to the market, he adds.
In millinery, designers tend to have fewer SKUs than in clothing or leather goods. The emphasis is on product recognition and hero items that are timeless, Brewin and Baginskiy agree. Baginskiy is focused on building a cool factor around his label now he has more budget for campaigns and marketing. A campaign featuring Noughties model Erin Wasson, shot in Paris, was released this month.
“When we started we couldn’t be global from day one,” he says. “We didn't have teams. We didn't have production capacity. We had zero social connections, but we had huge ambition and nothing to lose. So now, we’re fearless.”
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