What it’s actually like
Old Town has more places to buy a cowboy hat than ever, and most of them sell the decoration. AzTex Hat Company sells the hat. The shop on Scottsdale Road at Main Street is a working hatter’s store: shelves of felt and straw from the big Western makers, a custom program that builds fur-felt hats to order, and a renovation counter that cleans, reblocks and relines hats people have worn for decades. One of the testimonials the company publishes is from a customer whose thirty-year-old hat came back “almost like new” without losing its character, which is the job in a sentence.
The company started in Phoenix more than a quarter century ago, by its own account, and its custom work is the core. AzTex builds fur-felt Western and dress hats across grades from 7X to 100X, the X a rough measure of fur content and quality, says it makes a wider variety of custom styles than anyone in the business, and will copy a hat from a photo or a sample. It is also an approved renovator for Stetson, Resistol, Charlie 1-Horse and Dobbs, and has done restoration work for insurance claims, museums, other retailers, the Shriners and members of the Single Action Shooting Society, the cowboy-action shooters who care a great deal about period hats.
The stock goes well beyond Western: fedoras, Panamas, flat caps, pork pies, derbies, top hats, packable wool and big sizes up to 2X and 3X, from makers including Stetson, Resistol, Bailey, Atwood, Bullhide, American Hat Makers, Scala, Wallaroo, Henschel, Kangol, Dorfman Pacific, Betmar and Barmah.
What to buy
A custom felt hat. The reason the shop exists. Expensive, as the company says plainly, and built for people who want quality and a fit that was measured rather than guessed.
A Stetson or Resistol off the shelf, properly fitted. The everyday purchase, and better here than at a souvenir counter because someone will size it.
A renovation. Bring the old hat. Most jobs run $50 to $350, quoted only after the staff see it.
Free sizing. Not a purchase, but the most useful thing in the shop: a true measurement of head size and shape with hatter’s tools, offered whether or not you buy.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The shop sits on the east side of Scottsdale Road at Main Street, the seam between the Western storefronts of the old townsite and the galleries of the Main Street Arts District across the road. Scottsdale Road frontage is the hardest parking in downtown and the private lots enforce; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a few minutes’ walk east, and the Old Town on foot note covers the blocks between.
A custom hat is not a same-day purchase, so the best time to visit is early in a trip: get measured, choose a style, and arrange shipping home. The company’s phone line is staffed Monday through Saturday, ten to five Arizona time, for custom questions. The busy season is the same as every Western shop in town, from Parada del Sol and Western Week in February through spring training. Summer is quiet, and a good time to drop off a hat for renovation.
The shop’s fitting advice is worth knowing before you buy anywhere: the small bow inside the band goes at the back; a hat should be comfortable, never tight; hats shrink and do not stretch, so start a little big.
Eat while you’re there
The Rusty Spur Saloon on Main Street, in the 1921 bank building, is the correct place to wear a new hat for the first time. The Mission on Brown Avenue is the modern-Latin dinner beside the old adobe church, and Los Olivos on Second Street has served Sonoran plates since the late 1940s. The pink Sugar Bowl a block north on Scottsdale Road is the ice-cream stop.
How it got here
The cowboy hat has been Old Town’s logo since the 1950s, when the young town decided to sell itself as the West’s Most Western Town and the storefronts around Main Street and Brown Avenue put up false fronts and hitching rails. The outfitters that dressed that town, Saba’s and Porter’s among them, sold hats off the shelf and shaped them over a steamer, and the expertise lived behind the counter.
AzTex comes from the other half of that trade: the hatters who make and repair. By the company’s own account it started in Phoenix more than twenty-five years ago, and it built its name on custom fur-felt hats and on renovation, the work of cleaning, reblocking and relining hats that their owners refuse to replace. Approval as a renovator by Stetson, Resistol, Charlie 1-Horse and Dobbs is what separates that work from a steam-and-hope job, and it is why museums and insurance adjusters send hats to the shop as well as ranchers and re-enactors.
The 2020s changed the neighborhood around it. Hat bars arrived, Rancher Hat Bar up Scottsdale Road and the counters attached to Norde and Mavericks on Main Street, selling hats you design and decorate on the spot. They are fun, and a good one is a real hat. But when the brim of a twenty-year-old Stetson finally gives out, or a buyer wants a 100X felt built to a measured head, the work comes back to a shop like AzTex, a block from where Scottsdale first learned to sell the hat as a costume.