A Tip of the Hat for South Berwick's 'The Little Hat Company'

A tip of the hat for South Berwick's 'The Little Hat Company'

Its product included in Emmy gift bags coordinated by Portsmouth native

By JASON CLAFFEY jclaffey@fosters.com

Friday, May 15, 2009

The Little Hat Company owner Jen Houghton holds the "Cog" hat, featured on NBC's "Today" show Thursday. The hat was included in gift bags given to the Daytime Emmy Awards nominees Thursday in New York City. Claffey/ Democrat photo * Order a print of this photo

SOUTH BERWICK, Maine — When Rachel Ray, Ellen DeGeneres, and Tyra Banks were handed gift bags Thursday night during the Daytime Emmy Awards nomination party in New York, inside they could find bucket hats made by none other than the The Little Hat Company.

And owner Jen Houghton, whose store was nearly forced out of business earlier this year because of a federal lead testing law, couldn't be happier.

"Talk about having nine lives," Houghton said Thursday from her store's location in downtown South Berwick.

The gift bag placement is a major coup for the company, following a 1,000-unit order for commemorative hats it secured last year for the commissioning of the USS New Hampshire submarine.

Little Hat made about 160 "Cog" hats — short for incognito, as the purpose of the hats is to hide celebrities' faces — for the Emmy gift bags. Houghton secured the order after speaking with Val Wilson, co-owner of Bedford-based Off the Wall Promotions, at a recent Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce event. Wilson's company won a contract to make gift bags for both the Daytime Emmy and regular Emmy Awards this year.

The gift bags were featured on Thursday's "Today" show on NBC, and one of the items hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb picked out was the Cog hat.

Houghton called it "unbelievable."

"We want to become a national brand," she said, adding there's "no better way" to achieve that than by having celebrities use her product.

"Celebrities create trends," Houghton said. "We want them to create a trend with the Cog hat."

She said she originally planned to make children's hats for the gift bags, but instead made adult ones because a federal law requiring lead testing of all children's products was scheduled to go into effect earlier this year. But after an outcry from small business owners like Houghton, who said they couldn't afford the expensive testing costs, the Consumer Product Safety Commission delayed enforcing the law by a year.

Houghton said her company might make another order of hats — possibly up to 2,000 — for the regular Emmy Awards later this year.