ATMA, the women's hat collective outside cuenca

We had a great trip out through the beautiful countryside surrounding Cuenca to get to an all female owner hatmakers.  These women could use some publicity:  their factory is just outside the beautiful small town of Sig Sig.  The women at the tourist office in town didn't know about it and I had just read about it in passing,  hoping to support a much more sustainable kind of business that the other hat factory we had been in previously.  

As we arrived in the town, you could see local women casually weaving hats and the knowledgeable indigenous women at the factory helped us with every step, including sizing hats to my own hard-to-fit, gigantic head.  the prices here were much better than places in town - Quin's custom fit fino was only $40 and mine was less.  We got very individual attention and a quick tour of yhe factory.   More important to us wasbthe fact that the money from the sale went directly to these ladies.  

Homero Ortega & hijos, the Panama hat

Today , we took a tour of one of the Panama hat companies here in cuenca.   Although these hats originally were crafted along the coast jn places like montecristi,  they moved production to Cuenca many years back as it's a mhch more consistent climate and they're able to make the hats more regularly.

How they got named "Panama" hats is a little unclear,  but most people seem to blame Teddy Roosevelt,  who often wore one of these hats while surveying the construction of the Panama Canal.  The name stuck, much to Ecuadorians dismay.

We learned quite a bit about the materials and the processing,  how they're made and how to tell top quality.   It seems that they don't weave most of these hats there by themselves, but have a large network of area weavers that bring in their finished hats to sell to the factory.   These are bought mostly unshaped and unfinished.   Then craftsmen and women at the factory bleach and shape the hats.  It's a process that can take a long time,  cheaper hats can take 2 days, superfinos can take 2 months,  extremely high quality ones can take 6 to 8 months.  

As I already own 2 nice quality straw fedoras, I at least wanted to have one that's a different style.   And while the factory$280 superfino actually seemed like a bargain and having a hat freshly finished off the 100 year-old hat press to exactly my size, I can't make sense of owning 3 straw fedoras.  Even if I really wanted to.