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Although Tilley Hats are acknowledged as the best-made and most practical hats of their type in the world, no Tilley Hat, or anything else Tilley makes, is ‘perfect’. They have fun trying to make their ‘stuff’ better. Tilley began to use Hydrofil® as a sweatband material because it helps perspiration evaporate more quickly; they added a special plastic wire to better support the brims of some of their Tilley Hats; they added a sunglasses holder to all Hats that have ventilation grommets, and more recently, mesh to many of the lighterweight Hats, to help you remain cool and comfortable. Most Tilley hats have been designed in unisex styles to be worn by men and women.
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The Alex Tilley story:
Travellers have a right to insist upon dependable clothing that can withstand whatever the world has to offer. Function is important also, but not at the expense of comfort, and we've made sure all our Tilleys age ever so gracefully. Simple to clean, too. We aim for clothing you can launder in a hotel sink in the evening, hang to dry, and wear neat and ready to go to breakfast. Not all Tilleys wash 'n' wear this well - but most do.
Everything with our name on it is made in Canada where we can keep a watchful eye. Some exceptions are the world's best socks, made to our UNHOLEY specifications in Iowa, and the water bottle created out west for us in Washington.
Top Ten Truths
(click here to read)
Tilley Hat Ode to the Tilley Hat
or
"A Hobby Gone Haywire"
In which we oblige the occasional person who has asked how our modest Canadian company came to be.
About twenty years ago I came across one of the loves of my life: a homebuilt, 30'-long sailboat which I bought and renamed Karmananda. (Ananda means bliss, or such.)
I had searched throughout Ontario to find her; all the while she had been there at my own club, the National in Toronto, out in the yard, resting on her cradle, waiting...
To most people, I guess she didn't look like much, but she was beautiful to me. She needed work but her lines were elegant and except for her hull being covered by fiberglass that was slowly peeling away, she was made mostly of wood, including lots of mahogany and teak.
You should have seen her mast; it didn't rise vertically like ordinary masts! No, it was "raked" noticeably backwards in a most jaunty manner. And this tall, stout, Sitka Spruce spar even had wooden belaying pins arrayed around its base!
Alex Tilley
I fixed her up over several years. In the winter, when I couldn't work in the yard, I varnished her parts down in my basement. Coat after coat of varnish. Heck, one year I even had her anchor chromed! In time, she became more beautiful.
But there was still something missing. I couldn't find a cotton sailing hat in keeping with the quality of my lovely sloop. Sailors need hats and there wasn't a good-enough one anywhere. Realizing that others besides myself needed one too, I decided, in January 1980, to oversee the making of a proper one.
Three months later we had prototypes that my family and I could test on a sailing charter in Belize, and a couple of months after that we had succeeded in making some that we could attach our name to. By and by we were providing Tilley Hats to people who would drive to our home in suburban Toronto.
How did they first hear about them? I had traded some Hats for an ad in "Gam," a Canadian sailing magazine. And that fall, "Yachting" magazine gave us a third of a page editorial (I had sent the editor a Hat). Within a year we were selling Tilley Hats at boat shows throughout North America - sometimes selling them in the hundreds!
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