Dennis Plooij
REPORT
New supply of secondhand hats
collections offered per year, and – often – lower prices.”** This statement was made in 2017. Presently, more than seven years later, there is little reason to believe the situation has improved. Millinery is but a small part of the global fashion landscape, and milliners are known for ‘never’ throwing anything away. Materials are often expensive and are preciously conserved. After all, we never know if we are going to find the same material again when we need it, and in the same quality. Even little scraps of felt and straw can be used as trims, and unsold hats can be reworked into new designs. Also, generally speaking, profit margins in millinery are too low to allow for the destruction of either supplies or finished products. Furthermore, ‘deadstock’ is a relative concept where millinery is concerned. Certain materials or hat shapes that were considered outdated thirty or forty years ago are now welcomed as fashionable again by new generations of makers and consumers.
So how do milliners and hatters cope with leftover materials and manufactured
Secondhand hats ready for sale
** ‘A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future’ (2017) – Ellen MacArthur Foundation (
www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/ a-new-textiles-economy)
items? Here we speak with some businesses in the millinery industry about their approaches to extend the life cycle of these so-called ‘dead’ stocks. Recycling, long before it was trendy Plooij Hats and Materials is a well- known Dutch supplier of millinery materials, both ‘new’ and ‘second choice’, as well as hats. Henk, the father of Dennis Plooij, the current owner of the company, worked in the second- hand clothing business. The firm that employed him in the early 1980s had a hat department which exported second- hand hats to Indonesia. In Indonesia, a former Dutch colony, the Dutch used to wear felt hats, despite the tropical temperatures. Felt hats were considered a sign of social status; the Dutch were ‘toeans’, (gentlemen, Sirs). Although the Dutch East Indies officially gained its independence in 1949, the idea of status linked to the wearing of felt hats remained. When in 1985 the company that Henk worked for went bankrupt, he was approached by the Indonesian buyer asking if he would consider becoming their hat supplier. Thus, Plooij senior set up his own business, buying hats from different clothing sorting companies around Europe and, when he had enough to fill a sea container, shipping them to
Indonesia. There, the hats were either sold as they were, or taken apart, cleaned and reblocked. A second source of hats became the
hat factories. Henk started to buy the overproduction, their deadstock, which was sold for a fraction of the price. In the early 1990s, this led him to the German manufacturer Mayser, who in turn brought him into contact with Fepsa, the Portuguese felt-making company. When Fepsa had an order for one thousand felt bodies, they would make eleven hundred to cover possible production errors. These extra ten per cent were stocked, and when they had a warehouse full of unsold felts, they looked for someone to take them off their hands. The first batch Dennis’s father bought consisted of 50,000 cloches and capelines, which he sold straight to Indonesia. One day when he was in southern Germany visiting Mayser, they asked Henk to make an offer for their entire trimming stock, which they wanted to renew. He reluctantly made an offer, hoping someone else would get the deal, but before he had even reached home, he heard he was the new owner of three truckloads full of haberdashery! This was the start of Plooij as a supplier of millinery materials. Their new millinery
may 2024 | 49
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