​While you are on a construction site wearing a Carhartt hoodie or jacket and looking down at the Carhartt logo, you wonder what Carhartt's history was? You may think Carhartt is a brand for 20-30 years of age. Nope, you are almost 100 years off that guess. In 1889 Carhartt was founded by Hamilton Carhartt in Detroit, Michigan. Carhartt's started with two embroidery machines and six employees and was similar to Northwest Custom's beginning, but 100 years earlier. Old man Carhartt had a saying, "Honest value for an honest dollar." that resonated with many laborers in the Detroit area. 

The 1890s were booming for Carhartt, with the Trans Northern Railroad laying track only 2 miles from Carhartt's original manufacturing site. The site was perfect for Carhartt to sell jackets to the railway workers. Plus, being so close to the rail tracks, he could ship his jackets to the West Coast. Carhartt's expansion grew to 8 facilities around the country and continued growing until the Great Depression hit. 

​The Great Depression did thousands of businesses to close down and send their workers packing. Carhartt wasn't immune to this either; however, they pivoted and refocused on new customers and products. Carhartt closed down its jacket manufacturing facilities and started to make canvas tents from the same fabric as their jackets. The tents were for the workers of Roosevelt's "New Deal" program, the WPA (Works Progress Administration). President Roosevelt executed the WPA in May of 1935 to lift the bludgeoned economy out of the Depression. The Carhartt and the "New Deal" put thousands of workers back into Carhartt's factories, weaving canvas and sewing together tents for the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp). The CCC would cut trails in the newly formed National Park System. The CCC workers would again wear the Carhartt jacket and camp in the tents manufactured by Carhartt. It was a boom for Carhartt and its employees, who remained employed before leaving to fight in World War 2 in the early 1940s. 

The boom of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal had Carhartt riding on cloud nine financially before World War II started and drafting many male employees. Luckily, Carhartt could retain many female seamstresses and hire additional "Sally the Seamstresses" to work while the men were fighting off Adolph Hitler. World War II was even a better deal for Carhartt than the Great Depression by sewing military uniforms, such as cold weather jackets for European battles in winter. The soldiers liked the Carhartt jacket for its warmth and durability during the battles. One soldier even claimed that the jacket was so durable that a German round bounced off the jacket, saving his life. When World Two was over, Hamilton Carhartt was in his mid-90s and resigned from the day-to-day operations by turning the reigns of Carhartt over to his eldest son, Vinny. 

​Custom embroidery on the Carhartt jacket craze started in 1977 when constructing the Trans Atlantic Pipeline in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Nearly every pipeline worker demanded Carhartt embroidered jackets for employee identification and, more notably, staying warm in the sub-zero temperatures of Alaska. Northwest Custom Apparels founder, Jim Mickelson, started his company also in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Jim initially worked for the Atlantic Richfield company as a project manager based out of Tacoma and worked two weeks per month in Prudhoe Bay. Jim would sell embroidered trucker caps to coworkers and other oil companies up north. Like Carhartt, the pipeline workers wanted a warm sturdy baseball cap to keep their heads warm in the arctic. 

​Carhartt is known for its industrial embroidered work jackets that construction workers find a necessity to wear on the job sites. The popular colors of Carhartt jackets are the muted earth tone brown canvas jacket. The jackets are stiff, durable, and long-lasting but difficult to hoop and embroider. Embroidery companies must use special heavy-duty locking frames that are extremely expensive and only trained operators can use. Northwest Custom Apparel's staff is trained in using the Carhartt embroidery frames and is able to frame the stiffest jacket or bag. 

By Don Fair 
P-I Reporter (1987)

Some football fanatics will pay scalpers' prices to watch Sunday's American Conference championship game in the Los Angeles Coliseum, but the cap protecting the scalp of Seattle Coach Chuck Knox is not for
sale.
​​
​Not even for the $100 offered yesterday by one Seahawks caller.

​Knox favors a simple, navy-blue baseball-type model with the words "Seattle Seahawks" printed in white across the front crown.

​And while several different Seahawk hats are on general sale, you need good friends on the team, not money, to wear a cap like the coach's.
​
​The hat was designed by Walt Loeffler, the Seahawks' equipment manager, who has turned down a number of offers to mass market it.

​"I've been fighting it," says Loeffler. "I don't want 6.5,000 fans wearing the same hat worn by Coach Knox. I want it to be something a little special.

200 Special Caps
"I knew Knox liked hats. I didn't like the one our coaches used to wear (blue with a Seahawks logo patched on the front), so I designed this one," Loeffler said.

More than 92,000 tickets were printed for Sunday's game but Walt Loeffler, the Seahawks' equipment manager, ordered only just over 200 of these special Knox caps. Members of the coaching staff wear them.

One fan, an admirer of Knox's headgear, telephoned Seahawks headquarters yesterday and offered to pay $100 for the head coach's hat.

When told it wasn't for sale and that none is available for public purchase, the fan yelled "Go Hawks!" and hung up.

Three Seattle assistant coaches  join Knox in wearing the cap during games. They are assistant head coach Tom Prohaska, offensive coordinator Tom Catlin and backfield coach Chick Harris.

​There are five different styles of Seahawks caps available to the public. The most popular model for sale has a blue brim, a gray crown, and the team logo running along either side of the crown.

3,500 tickets gone

​Meanwhile, only 150 tickets to Sunday's game against the Raiders at home in Los Angeles are still available in the Seattle area. They are at Doug Fox Travel, and they are expected to be gone later today.

The Beginning
An American skipper who I recently fished the Bering Sea in a joint venture with the Soviets came home grinning about the way he and his cronies had surprised the foreigners with monster tows and plugged processing ships. He said the Russians were a little slow to pick up on the sharpness and fish the wisdom of the American draggers, and to strengthen his point, he whipped off his elegant sable hat and said, "Here look at this. Those guys were so lame they traded this or one of that whadda you call ems, you know," he reached for the words. "A goddamn baseball hat."

"Gimme one of those hats"
Long before baseball hats went to sea, the fertilizer, seed, and machinery salespeople in the brown dirt bible belt were passing them out to farmers. "Gimme one of those hats, will ya," was a good way to say hello to a salesman. And the salespeople, confronted with the straight-laced men in three-syllable Jesus country was glad they had the hats in a territory where their regular handouts-booze and girlie calendars-were verboten.

John Deere to Rock Stars
The hottest items on the promotional baseball hat scene for the year were from John Deere, Cat Diesel, and Ralston Purina, and the people who wore them were those who used the products the hats touted. Then about ten years ago, the hats became chic, and rock stars wore them on album covers. Since then, it's been a hat city, especially in the seafood industry. One-for-one trades are common, and processors, suppliers, and fishers' groups buy them by the gross to pass around the fleets.

Naturally, somebody has to make all those patches and hats, and in this part of the country, they come from an unassuming company on a Tacoma side street. Northwest Embroidery was started in 1977 by Jim Mickelson and Ray Roger, who knew a good thing when they saw it.

Alaska Leads to Japan
At the time, Mickelson was working for ARCO in Prudhoe Bay with a crew of 110. At the end of the stint in the arctic, Mickelson ordered hats for the whole team as keepsakes, a kind of thank-you for good service. The hates said, "Prudhoe Bay Alaska, Keep America Independent," and they were a big hit. When Mickelson tried to find a bargain for his second order - by this time, he was selling the leftovers for $5.00 apiece, and he found out that no one was manufacturing the patches in the Northwest.

Mickelson, who is a very up fellow in his late thirties, saw a hole that needed filling, " I checked all over the place about buying the equipment to stitch the patches and finally came across a Japanese company that made me an offer I couldn't refuse," Mickelson said. He had been working for the oil company for over a decade and wanted to take a chance. As his inquiries progressed, Mickelson also confirmed his plan to leave ARCO after getting the business rolling. 

"The guy from Barudan (the Japanese company) called me up when he heard I was looking around and told me to come to North Carolina to look at a typical machine in use, " Mickelson said. "I said to myself, "What the hell is this? I'm the buyer. They should come to me," but like he was reading my mind, the guy says, "You like to make money? You come down here and see this machine. We'll teach you everything you have to know, and if you go belly-up within one year, you get your money back."

Patches and Blue Jean Pockets
The machines performed as advertised, proving to be the latest technological marvels in an old traditional hand-work trade. With a punch-tape programmer and batteries of automated stitchers, a company like Northwest can simultaneously embroider dozens of patches, blue jeans pockets, or any other fabric. On the horizon, according to Mickelson, are sewing instant patches for the walk-in custom trade. In such an operation, the patch pattern and wording would be punched into a typewriter-like keyboard and transferred directly to the stitcher.

While Mickelson was discovering how to produce the hats, Ray Rogers worked some small miracles developing markets to launch the business. Mickelson and Rogers own a tape programmer and three stitchers and run the entire operations with 15 employees in two shifts. Mickelson estimates that he can turn out 150 patches per hour, and the company has taken off. "It was good right from the beginning," said Mickelson, who is building a new plant in the nearby Milton this year. "We stress quality, satisfied customers, and high-grade America-made caps. That formula has worked for us."

Quality in every Stitch
Each patch takes from 1,500 to 15,000 individual stitches to produce a design. Mickelson's tape programmer, a young man, named David Saunders, traces over a design drawn six times life-size, outlining every stitch. "If I make a mistake," Saunders said, " I have to start over from the beginning. That isn't very good. An artist can erase a mistake, but not me."

From Saunder's tracing, the computer makes a wide, perforated paper tape that calls the shots for the stitchers. A test patch is then made to check the design and the programming, and the multiple stitchers go to work. 

Jimmy Carter Shows off his Cap
Mickelson confesses that he has yet to produce a hat for Northwest Embroidery but says he's proud to have outfitted Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner. "We made two hats for Carter and destroyed the tape," Mickelson said. "They wanted it that way. The Union group sponsored his visit has one, and Carter has the other.

​"Carter was delighted with the hat," Mickelson said, "Even he is subject to the identity syndrome as I call the desire to wear logo hats." Everybody wants to be part of something. If an employer gives a person a hat, they are usually proud to wear it. That seems to double in the fishing business.