IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BIG HEAD. Specifically, I wear a size 8 1/2. Putting a standard hat or knitted cap on a conk that size is like trying to pull a child’s mitten over a bowling ball. And in a Chicago winter, it means choosing between head freeze or brain squeeze.
So I wear a fedora that I bought a few years ago from a hatmaker website. It’s never been ideal; I was shooting for a Spencer Tracy look but wound up on the Indiana Jones side of the scale. So when the lid needed cleaning this fall, I went looking for someone local who could do it right.
Since this is no longer the kind of job you can assign to your local cleaners, I started with local review sites like Yelp and Google Local, but quickly moved to social communities and blogs like OpenCrown.com and the Fedora Lounge bulletin board. They were informative but didn’t produce a strong local option for my needs, even when I specifically asked for a Chicago-based cleaner.
Neither did searching on “fedora cleaning,” although I did learn that there’s a town named Fedora in South Dakota.
What did the trick was a search for “hat cleaning Chicago,” which brought up two organic-search options in Google Places. Both listings included maps, but only one, Optimo Hats, also came with five reviews, including three directly from Google users, all of them using words like “fantastic” and “a real gem.” The review content also mentioned that Optimo provided hats for the 2002 Tom Hanks movie “Road to Perdition” and for local blues god John Lee Hooker.
I next went to their Optimo’s website, read the history of the place, and got to check out an interactive catalog of what looked like about 1,000 styles — each with color choices and three views: front, back and profile.
I even found video from Bloomberg Businessweek profiling owner Graham Thompson as an entrepreneur.
Good enough for me. I downloaded the Google directions to my mobile phone, since Optimo is 25 miles away on the south side, and made the trip.
End result: The shop not only got my hat cleaning business but upsold me to a brim cut-down for a small extra fee. And yes, a look at the shop and the professionalism of the owners convinced me to plunk down about five times what I spent on that first fedora for a custom-made job.
I also tried on a few high-end Panama straws, and signed up for Optimo’s newsletter and news of their periodic trunk shows and promotional events in local clubs and jazz spots.
So if you’re asking yourself why, as a marketer, you bother with social networking, blogger outreach, generating customer reviews, or optimizing your website for search, local search or merchandising … I know an entrepreneurial hatmaker in Chicago who can give you good reasons to put all those channels together.
Network
