With a lot of important stuff that happens in life, we never get a full picture of how it came to pass. Often the info is just not there to know, or else it takes some time, and maybe a very indirect route, before the whole story shakes itself out. Which brings us to our own Real Deal Brazil recycled-tarp hat, and the blockbuster horror-comedy Zombieland, which upped our hat's profile more than we ever could have imagined.
We'd always understood that our hat's star-turn in the film, which came out in October 2009, was due solely to someone in the Zombieland costuming department being charged with finding some really cool headwear for Woody Harrelson that also had the unusual distinction of being exceedingly Earth-friendly to boot. And all that is, in fact, true. However, it's only part of the truth. The whole story, which we just learned only recently, and totally by accident, is more complicated, and also a whole lot cooler still!
The total tale dates back to a wildly favorable article that appeared early in our company's history, in Tattoo magazine, and a guy named Steve Barnes who read that review thinking the Real Deal Brazil hat, and its recycled origins, were right up his own alley.
"I saw that hat and just thought it was too cool," he says.
So he bought one through our website. And he loved it.
"Too cool," he reiterates.
That's Steve in the picture above with his hat and a just-caught lake bass, during a trip to Shreveport, La. Steve actually lives in Houston, Texas, working as a directional driller, which means land, ocean and inland-barge drilling, often for oil. Steve explains his work with words like "azimuth," "porosity," resistivity," "payzone" and "geo-steering," none of which we remotely understand. All we know for sure is that he's obviously way smarter than we are!
Some months after reading that Tattoo review and buying his own hat -- Steve thinks maybe as much as a year later -- he was bound for a drilling job and loaned his much-loved RDB to his brother, Patrick, who works as a film-set crane operator. And it just so happened that Patrick was then part of the initial filming in south Georgia for a much-buzzed-about zombie flick starring Woody Harrelson -- you probably can guess the one. So there was Patrick on the Zombieland set, his brother's Real Deal Brazil recycled-tarp hat perched upon his head.
Woody Harrelson, ever the hat guy, noticed Patrick's distinctive headwear almost immediately. "He saw it, and loved it and wanted more just like it," Steve says.
The outcome of that decision? Well, Woody looks pretty cool in that Zombieland hat of his, huh?
Of course, Steve didn't learn any of this right away. "Patrick didn't tell me about it until after the movie came out, and I asked for the hat back," Steve recalls.
We didn't learn any of this ourselves until Steve sent us that fishing pic of him in his influential RDB hat. And the rest, as they say, is our own company's recent history: The Zombieland costuming crew contacted us and asked us to overnight them a bunch of samples, which we obviously, and very happily, did. Flash-forward another year from then, and our hat has become iconic perched there atop Woody's own badass head, with Zombieland fans responding accordingly, buying bunches of Woody's badass hat for themselves. So now we hear ourselves called "that Zombieland hat," and we just have to smile. Yep. That's us, all right!
And so now we offer even bigger thanks to our new hero Steve the driller, for his thinking so much of us in the first place, and for then sharing all that RDB love with his brother, Patrick. Another nod to Patrick, for sporting that hat pretty dang well, apparently, in Steve's absence. And finally, our thanks, too, to Tattoo, of course, for giving us the, y'know, ink!
Our own Real Deal Brazil hats are off to all of you!
