REPORT
top producing countries in
Italy
United Kingdom Spain
Poland
Germany Sweden France
Denmark Slovakia Austria
europe | 2021 (in thousand units)
2.108 1.498 814 601 581 555 395 364 193 159
total production. These countries were followed by Poland, Germany, Sweden and France, which together accounted for a further 26%.
From 2016 to 2021, the biggest increases were in Sweden, while hat and headgear production for the other leading countries experienced more modest paces of growth.
To keep production of headwear in Europe is challenging enough as it is, without additional stumbling blocks such as a pandemic. Competition from low- cost countries, shortage of materials, increasing shipping and energy costs – to name a few factors – are daily concerns for European manufacturers. Usually, if
a factory has to close its doors, a lot of knowledge gets lost as workers find jobs elsewhere or disappear from the industry forever. Fortunately, governments in many countries seem to acknowledge this as they have been quite supportive to the local manufacturing industry in the past two years. This proves to be money well spent as hat factories see their order books growing now that markets are opening up again. Here below, headwear manufacturers from four different European countries share their stories about how they managed to keep producing close to home for such a long time – or even started a whole new production line – and what their expectations for the future are.
Mark Snoxell
Snoxell & Gwyther Luton, UK
The past two years have been challenging for everybody in the hat industry, but even more for companies specialised in occasionwear. One of the companies that saw their sales drop overnight when all racing and wedding events were put on hold in 2020 is Luton- based occasionwear hat manufacturer K.R. Snoxell & Sons.
14 | the hat magazine #93
“I think that people come to us because they want the model look, something that makes them stand out at an event,” says Mark Snoxell, one of the owners and designers at Snoxell & Sons. “Our designs are always popular among visitors of weddings, but 2020 was going to be the big year. People love special dates, so loads of weddings were planned and everybody was really going for it. We had special labels made for our hats with ‘2020’ in it, but within a few months it was all cut short. When the pandemic started in March, we had to remain closed for four months and business fell flat. The second half of 2020, business slowly started to come back and it was a bit on and off until shops were fully open again in April 2021. From that moment on, suddenly it all went crazy. Weddings were coming back on, and people wanted hats. We didn’t foresee this sudden demand, but we managed to get through. This year, right from the first week of January, it has been even more crazy. We have never known January and February months like this. Hat shops put
in forward orders but are also filing in for repeat orders every day since February, which is quite unusual.”
Snoxell & Sons was founded in 1971 in the town of Luton, which was once one of the main hat manufacturing regions in Europe. In the 1930s, hundreds of hat-related factories and businesses were located within a quarter mile of the train station. Nowadays, only a handful are left. When a few decades ago the fashion and next the hat industry started to move production to low-wage countries in Asia, Snoxell did not have much choice other than to follow this strategy, as producing in the UK had become too expensive. “We don’t manufacture our whole
collection in Luton anymore,’’ says Mark. “Probably 80 per cent of our hats are coming in off-site and 20 per cent are produced here in-house. What we definitely don’t produce here are the smaller fascinators, because we don’t have the hand skills to make those in the volumes we need – which are thousands. People would love to see full working factories in the UK, with hundreds of milliners sitting around a table like it used to be, but that is never going to happen, as people aren’t coming into the trade.
Source: IndexBox
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