How did you come up with the idea for Hat & Spicy? 

I wanted the spare room in my house to look like one of the rooms in the ‘Who do you think you are’ – Spice Girls video. So I went and bought a huge roll of long pile orange faux fur and covered all the walls in it. I had a load of excess left over, so I just started covering stuff in orange faux fur, including an old floppy sun hat. My friend had a baby blue Emma Brewin, that I was in love with & I’d also been obsessing over Benny Andallos fluffy green hat worn by FKA Twigs. Neither which I could afford at the time (this was just between the first two lockdowns and my work was non-existent), so this was a chance to create something similar for myself. 

The hat looked amazing and I wore it to a fancy dress party, put up a load of photos up on instagram and my friend Louise Carmell who is a stylist asked if she could loan it for a shoot – her photos were amazing! Another of my friends Alex, wore the same hat to Shambala Festival, she looked so bomb and got sooooo many people approach her, asking where she got the hat. So I then thought maybe I was on to something here. Because of my job, I’m part of some costume networking groups on facebook , a woman on there was selling a big box of faux fur offcuts cheap. I bought the furs with the hats in mind and got a little creative, patch-working the offcuts together. The first hat made from these offcuts, I gave to my best mate Demi for her birthday, and made another for myself – we both wore these to We Out Here festival last summer – and, like with Alex, the hats got a LOT of attention. In the wee hours of the morning at one of the stages a lovely girl called Lola excitedly approached me, asking to try on the hat and convinced me to set up shop and, became my first customer! BIG UP LOLA. Fast forward a few months, a few more festivals, a lot more parties and countless excited people asking ‘where did you get that hat?!’ I finally decided to start up a Depop page. Within a few days I had a notification to say that Depop had featured the hats on their discover & explore page, which gave the page a huge kick start. A week later, I got a DM on my personal instagram for Depop, saying that they were going to feature the page on their instagram on Saturday night, which was also Halloween night – a prime time spot for insta, with everyone sharing their costumes, eeeeeeek!! BIG UP DEPOP!!

So, I was kind of given the push to set up my own page ASAP – and had to also come up with a name to go with this. I knew that I wanted the brand to be something fun and incorporate a play on words. I had a toss up between That’s Hat (in homage to Paris Hilton) or Hat & Spicy. I ended up choosing Hat & Spicy because that’s exactly how you feel when you’re at a party and wearing one of the hats! I also wanted to add the ‘party supplies’ tagline – as again, this is exactly what they are; the piece de resistance to your party look, whether its for a festival, a birthday, a show., whatever. It was also a bit of a play on the business cards that dealers drop off everywhere. I made up a load of business cards that just said ‘party supplies’ on one side and ’@hat.n.spicy’ on the other and dropped them around various places. People might have been a bit disappointed when they found hats rather than their local dealer lol. Anyway, I digress, I set up the page on Friday night, then Saturday Depop made their post, tagged the insta and then from there it sort of took off nicely. I started getting orders in, messages for loans and yeah it’s been a bit of weird, accidental whirlwind and I feel very blessed and grateful for all the lovely opportunities that have come my way since.