Satya's Hats

Satya Twena by Cole Wilson

ojai

QUARTERLY

SUMMER 2019

SATYA & HER HATS

Taking Care of Her Mother, Business

THE BARD IS BACK

‘Much Ado’ About Shakespeare’s Return

OJAI’S NOMAD

Leslie Clark Ready for Next Adventure

THE LAST VAQUERO

Dan Lopez & Ojai’s Rancho Days

$5.95

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Photo by Nick Onken for Satya Twena.

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SATYA’S HATS

BY ROBIN GERBER

THE CALL CAME IN 2010, when Satya Twena’s life felt unsettled, even chaotic. Just 27 years old, she had been married for less than three years, and now she felt up-ended by her parents’ divorce. She had been working in New York City for Bill Sofield, a high-end designer. But working on multi-million dollar homes didn’t feel fulfilling.

Satya signed up for a smorgasbord of courses at FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, searching for what to do next with her creativity. She had taken apparel design, sewing, just finished hat-making, and moved on to gemology when the phone rang.

In that cluster of accelerating heartbeats it takes to absorb bad news, Satya learned that her adored mother, the Ojai artist Pamela Grau, had breast cancer.

What do you do when your mother is three thousand miles away, and like her mother before, Satya’s grandmother, you know this disease might kill her? And your mother tells you she’s started chemotherapy, and that her hair is falling out so she shaved it, and that her bare head is cold?

If you’re Satya, you think about that cool millinery class you took. You think about how you loved hats since you were a kid, and how your husband wears one. You think about making a hat to keep your mom’s head warm, to make her feel hip and cute. You think about designing a hat that only a daughter could make to protect her mother’s head. To protect her mother.

The hat was a dark brown fedora, with a wide, tie-dyed, grosgrain trim, that made Pamela’s large brown eyes look larger. Satya made it in her apartment with a Jiffy steamer and her home oven. The hat made Pamela smile, a broad, joyful, unabashed smile that’s a mirror image of Satya’s.

“My mom,” Satya says, “is accomplished, smart, independent, and always lived her dreams with grace.” And just at the moment that Satya was questioning what to do with her own life, she saw a change in Pamela. “After she had cancer,” Satya says, “she went from living life for everyone else to living life fiercely the way she wanted.”

Satya quit her interior design job, after Pamela gave her advice that Satya never forgot. “Stop doing anything that isn’t bringing you immense joy,” Pamela said. “Do what you love.” In a miracle of unintended consequences, Satya realized that she loved making hats, like the one for her mom. Her inner entrepreneur, a force since she was a child, kicked in, and she decided to become a milliner. Satya Twena Fine Millinery was born. Satya launched her company at ABC Carpet and Home in Manhattan, a place she calls, “one of the best stores in the world.” Despite their name, ABC sells an eclectic mix of products in lavish displays. “They gave me the mezzanine for my opening, and mom flew out.” Satya remembers. “She was still going through treatment, so she needed to wear a mask on the plane. Her immune system was very weak. Her doctor had advised her not to go.”

Satya started showing up at events with her husband Jeffrey Zurofsky, a restaurateur and chef. She wore her hats, and she got noticed. Satya remembers that two women she met fell in love with her creations. They told her that the Central Park Conservancy had a hat event every year. “You have to make hats for us and our friends,” they said.

Satya thought of her hats as “art pieces on headbands with veils.” But soon rich, chic eighty-year-old women were walking up the long flights to her apartment, where she was experimenting with making hats using pots,

pans, some hat blocks and a steam table to turn out one-of-a-kind pieces. “I was good at trying, failing, and figuring it out,” Satya says. She also hired two women off Craigslist as sewing assistants. “My husband came home from a trip to San Francisco to find two strangers in our living room.” Satya laughs.

“That’s something my mom would have done.”

Soon a friend from the fashion industry told her that she had to visit Makins, a hat factory on Thirty-fifth Street. Satya remembers going to this, “unkempt workshop, up on the 12th floor, in the middle of the Garment District. There were hats everywhere, even on the floor, as well as cloth, ribbons, thread, wooden hat forms, sewing machines, steam tables, pipes sticking out of walls.” In the industrial chaos, the employees were making hats. For forty years, Makins had been making hats by hand.

FRANKSINATRA,SAMUEL L.JACKSON, BILLCLINTON, ANDBRUNO MARSHAD WORNMAKINS’ HATS.

Marsha Akins founded the factory after working out of her East Village apartment, just like Satya. But her son, a Harvard lawyer, had taken over. He agreed to make private label hats for Satya, and she started branding everything, the hats, hatboxes, labels, cards, and thank you notes, as “made by Satya Twena.”

Meanwhile, Satya launched her website, and Huffington Post, Cool Hunting and others wrote about her. “I had always been good at drumming up publicity,” Satya says. She got a good order from Treasure & Bond, a new concept store started by Nordstrom. Henry Bendel’s gave her a trunk show table for a week in the front of the store, and Satya “knocked it out of the park.” Her “fascinators,”

a kind of small hat or headband with large ribbons, flowers, or other attachments, like the Queen wears in England, were selling well. She had ‘influencers’ on Instagram boosting her brand. But she was only making enough money to cover her costs.

After two years, Satya felt frustrated, burnt out, and overwhelmed by the responsibility of having employees who relied on her. She kept the business going, but took off for a couple of months in Paris. She needed time to think and get inspired. Shortly after she returned in 2014, while she was visiting Pamela in Ojai, she got a call from a Makins’ employee who said, “come and get your stuff before it’s all lost or stolen.” Makins had closed down.

Makins was the last hat factory in Manhattan. Satya had gotten to know the highly skilled employees. “I learned how to make hats by watching them,” Satya recalls, “and if I didn’t like something I could go to them and have them explain why they did the production the way they did.”

Makins’ closure stunned Satya. She saw it as a sign that she should stop making hats. But Jeffrey said, ‘why not ask how much it would cost to buy the factory?’”

Makins was behind in their lease, the space needed work, and the owner had lost his passion for the business. He agreed to sell to Satya.

With the support of Jeffrey, and Satya’s younger cousin, Malka, and with loans from her mom, her aunt, and a few friends, Satya came up with just enough money to take over the factory’s lease and buy the assets of Makins. Her mom flew out when the deal was closed. She scrubbed floors, and bought Satya her first industrial vacuum.

Satya decided to launch her first Kickstarter campaign. She needed money to get the business running again. She promoted the campaign by inviting people to make their own hats at her new factory.

All hats start with the hair of animals, like rabbits, sheep or beaver. Beaver fur would make a softer hat than rabbit. In an age-old process, the animal hair is ‘felted’ into the basic hat body. First, the raw hair is fluffed in a big pile, and then put into a machine with a large mound-shaped mold in the center. The fur fibers get whipped around and are matted, pressed and condensed together as they stick to the mold.

This hat body would be taken by Satya and her team who used steam and brute force to form it to the wooden hat molds. This is called ‘blocking,’ and gives hats their shape. Color and decoration are then added. “You

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Satya with her mother, artist Pamela Grau.

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Photo by Nick Onken

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can’t automate quality hat-making,” Satya says. “Start to finish, a lot of hands have to touch a hat to get it made right.”

For the Kickstarter, Satya reached out to her tastemaker friends, offering them a chance to create a limited edition collection of their own hats. Kelly Framel, the Glamourai, who has a hundred thousand followers, came to the factory and made a hat. She loved the experience, as did Stacy London, from the TV show “What Not To Wear,” and Jamie Beck from Ann Street Studios. “We got hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on the Kickstarter campaign,” Satya says, “because the influencers talked about the experience, and encouraged people to support keeping the factory alive.”

Satya was part of the ‘makers’ movement, where crafts people were opening their studios to allow the public to experience their process first-hand. But no one had done that for hats. “It was an adrenaline rush,” Satya says. “People would come in, and we had a showroom of different styles. They would pick their style, then we’d take them to a material room to pick their color, and then they’d watch the hats threshed with steam, and formed over the hat molds, and then they’d go to the next station. People who watched on social media wanted to do it too.”

For nearly five weeks, everybody’s feed on Facebook and Instagram was about Satya’s factory. She also had about two thousand hats left over at Makins that she sold as part of the campaign. “It was hard work to clean and prep those hats,” Satya says, “but it was a really fun time.” Her goal on Kickstarter was $75,000, but she made $171,966. Nearly 1400 people backed the project by buying hats.

Suddenly, celebrities discovered Satya’s creations. A friend was touring with Madonna, and asked Satya to make the singer a hat. Satya was getting calls asking, “Can you make Lady Gaga a hat? Can you make Oprah a hat for the cover of her magazine?” Satya’s hats were featured on two Oprah covers backto-back.

By mid-2016, two years after taking over Makins’ factory, Satya’s business had taken off. That’s when the landlord called to say he wasn’t going to renew her lease. Undeterred, Satya thought they could find a factory space in Brooklyn, but Jeffrey suggested they hold off on finding a new location.

Satya was pregnant with their first baby, and Jeffrey thought it would be great for her to be near her mom when she gave birth. Satya agreed, and they started going back and forth from New York to Ojai where they

found their midwife, Mary Jackson. They also looked for a place to spend a few months after the baby arrived.

“OURINTENTIONWASN’T TOMOVE TO OJAI,”SATYA SAYS,“BUT WE FELLIN LOVE WITHTHE PEOPLE,THE ARTISTS,THE LAND,AND THEN,OF COURSE,THERE’S MYMOM.

My mom and I used to joke that she would move to New York, and we’d be neighbors because we wanted to see each other every day.” Suddenly, Ojai appeared as the place to bring Satya and her mom’s dream to life. “After I got pregnant, and she had beat cancer, this was our chance. Now I see my mom everyday. It’s the best blessing. It’s super special.”

Satya settled into Ojai, but a huge opportunity back in New York still loomed. She had been working for several years with Neiman Marcus to create her own hat shop inside their first New York City store in Hudson Yards, the new Manhattan retail space. People would be able to design and make their own hats, or buy ready-made creations.

Neiman Marcus was set to open in mid- March of 2019, but in 2018, with a toddler, and pregnant again, Satya felt like, “There was no way I could do it. I hadn’t done a large production of hats since the factory closed.”

But Jeffrey encouraged her, and two days before her son was born, when the President of Neiman Marcus called and said, ‘are you going to do this or not?’ Satya said said, “Yes.”

Satya gave birth on Saturday in mid- January. On Monday, she was in her studio with four strangers from Ojai who had answered her call for helpers posted on an Ojai community Facebook page. As Jeffrey made coffee for the crew, Satya showed them the various steps in making a hat. “They jumped right in, and were amazing and perfect,” Satya says. They had three weeks to get the hats done.

Susan Bruce, who lives on Foothill Road, was one of the first to offer to work for Satya. “She was amazing,” Susan says, “I did hand and machine work on the hats, and I learned a lot. Sometimes, Satya needed to lie down or nurse her baby, and we’d go to her with questions. Her energy and drive were incredible.” Just in time for the Neiman Marcus opening, Satya sent one-hundredand-ninety-two hats, including some that required six hours of hand-stitching, from Ojai to New York.

On March 13th, Liza Minelli sang, Arianna Huffington chit-chatted and Whoopi Goldberg posed for pictures at the grand opening of Neiman Marcus in Hudson Yards. In a fifth floor boutique space, on an enormous white wall, the name “Satya Twena” stood out in bold white letters. Underneath were hats. A burgundy beaver felt hat with metallic gold starburst stitched on the brim. Another in brown, and one in cream with Matilija poppies. An oversized floppy straw hat, with graceful curves, sat on a stand surrounded by fun accessories.

Satya was at the opening wearing a floorlength, black Wendy Nichol sleeveless lace dress, and her burgundy Panama sun hat. Pamela was at her daughter’s side, her hair now a thick mass of glorious white curls. Her head may not be cold anymore, but she still loves to wear Satya’s hats. ≈OQ≈

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