Thanks for stopping by and let me tell you a little bit about our company. My name is Niki Manning and I’m a custom hat maker located in Boise, Idaho. I like to tell people about my journey in becoming a custom hat maker. I’m originally from the Midwest…a Nebraska girl to be specific, but in 2013 a job transfer for my husband brought our family out to Boise, Idaho. I spent the last 22 years working in the health care industry as a respiratory therapist mostly in the ICU and the last couple of years as a case manager for a health insurance company. My husband is a pilot but I will occasionally have him helping me out in the shop and you may see him here and there on Instagram, but it’s mostly me making all the hats.

A trip to Utah for my birthday changed all of that. My husband and I purchased two western hats and we watched them shape them and when I walked away, I decided I wanted to learn how to do that. I wanted to learn that even though I didn’t fully know the extent of EVERYTHING that I would end up learning.

It only took a few weeks to find a mentor to learn this new trade and I’ve been extremely lucky to learn from a master hatter willing to share all the trade secrets and teach me how to make hats the way they did over 100 years ago. Most hats now are made in a factory with machines that press and heat the hats, but every single hat made at Indian Creek Hat Company is made one-at-a-time and made by hand from a raw hat body. A TRULY CUSTOM HAT is way more than just steaming a hat to put a crease in the crown and shaping up the brim.

I’ve been fortunate to grow this business and truly love the craft of hat making. If you’d like to watch the process of this incredible hat making trade, follow along over on my Instagram page: Indian Creek Hat Co. (and then if you decide you can’t live without a custom hat….you can message or call me to get one started!)