What it is
Watson’s Hat Shop is a hattery, in the old sense: a workroom where hats are made, with a sales floor attached. It sits in Stagecoach Village at the Carefree end of Cave Creek Road, in a space Eric Watson moved into when his original Cave Creek storefront, opened in October 2012, became too small for the machinery. The machinery is the point. Watson works on millinery equipment from the late 1800s and early 1900s, old Singer sewing tables, wooden hat blocks, and an antique conformateur, the hinged contraption that takes an exact map of your head so the hat can be shaped to it. A custom hat goes through about 65 steps between the raw felt body and the finished brim.
The hats are cowboy hats in beaver and fur-felt blends, fedoras, bowlers, Aussie-style hats and panamas woven from Cuenca straw, each blocked, shaped and trimmed by hand. Watson is self-taught, a trained commercial pilot who got the idea from Indiana Jones’s fedora as a child and made his first hat at 22. By 2019 he had made about 1,500 of them, including hats for Kenny Chesney, Al Roker, Justin Timberlake and the principal cast of the Netflix western Godless.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale sells cowboy hats on every block of Old Town, and some of them are good; our guides to Aztex Hat Company, the Rancher Hat Bar and Porter’s cover that trade. What Scottsdale no longer has is someone making the hat from the felt up, on the equipment it was made on a century ago. If you want the one Western purchase that will outlast the trip, it is this, and it costs what that implies.
The practical version
About thirty-eight minutes from Old Town with no traffic: Scottsdale Road north until it ends in Carefree, west on Cave Creek Road, and Stagecoach Village is on the north side just across the town line; the shop is Suite 148. Go on a weekday morning for an unhurried fitting. A custom hat starts in the hundreds of dollars and runs into the thousands; some hats can be ready in a couple of days, true customs take longer and ship.
When to go
Weekday mornings, October through April, when the shop is open, the hatters have time, and the rest of Cave Creek is worth the drive too. Festival weekends at Stagecoach Village, Taste of Cave Creek in October and Western Holidays in December, bring crowds to the village and a line to the shop, which is fun to watch and a poor time for a fitting. Summer is quiet and perfectly good for the fitting itself, if nothing else.
How a fitting goes
You sit. The conformateur goes on your head and produces a small paper card with the exact outline of your skull, which becomes the shape the hat is blocked to. You choose the felt, from fur blends up to pure beaver, which is the cost driver; the crown style; the brim width and the way it is flanged; the band and the trim. If the body is in stock, the hat can sometimes be finished in a couple of days; a fully custom build takes longer and most visitors have it shipped. If you want to wear something out, ask what is finished and in stock in your size.
What to buy if you are not buying a hat
A hat brush, and the five-minute lesson in how to pick up a felt hat by the brim rather than the crown, which the shop gives freely because it has restored too many hats ruined that way. The shop also sells vintage hats it has restored, which is a cheaper way into a good one.
With kids
Short and supervised. The floor is a workshop with hot irons and a century of machinery; a ten-year-old who likes seeing how things are made will remember it.
The neighborhood
Stagecoach Village around the shop has Western interiors, galleries, a coffee shop, a pizza bistro and a beer room; our Stagecoach Village guide walks it. The saloon strip is a mile west and Carefree’s sundial is a few minutes east. Our Cave Creek guide sets the day.
The story
Eric Watson came to hats sideways. He trained as a commercial pilot, and the fixation that led to the shop was a boy’s fixation on a movie fedora. He taught himself to make hats, bought the old machinery that the trade had abandoned when factory hats took over, and finished his first custom hat at 22. In October 2012, at 26, he opened Watson’s Hat Shop in Cave Creek, a town whose working ranchers, rodeo riders and Saturday bikers were the right first customers; the actual first customer was a Merrill Lynch broker who bought two hats and two hatboxes.
The shop outgrew its first room within a few years. By early 2017 Watson had moved into Stagecoach Village at the Carefree end of town, a space more than twice the size, with room for the machinery, a sales floor and apprentices; Alex Cabrera has trained there as a hatter. The commissions got stranger and better: a toque with a Western brim for Bryan Dooley of Bryan’s Black Mountain Barbecue down the road; hats for the principal cast of Godless, the 2017 Netflix western; hats for Kenny Chesney, Al Roker and Justin Timberlake. By 2019 the count was about 1,500 hats, and Watson’s line to visiting journalists was that Cave Creek keeps cowboy culture alive, which is true and is also why the shop is here rather than in Scottsdale.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s Western-wear trade, from Porter’s in Old Town to the hat bars that have opened in the last decade, sells the finished product; Watson’s is the workshop behind the idea. The rodeo and horse-show crowd that fills Scottsdale every winter, which our Western heritage note describes, is a good part of the shop’s clientele, and the Arabian show, the Parada del Sol and Cave Creek’s own rodeo days put more of his hats in one place than anywhere else.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north until it ends at Cave Creek Road in Carefree, then west a few minutes to Stagecoach Village on the north side at 7100 East Cave Creek Road; the shop is Suite 148. About thirty-eight minutes from Old Town, fifteen to twenty from the Troon and Pinnacle Peak resorts. Free parking in the village lots. Our getting-around note has the rideshare math if you are not driving.