Carol Lipnick and Ed Dougherty inside Berkeley Hat Company in 1995. Courtesy: Carol Lipnick
After nearly 50 years, the Berkeley Hat Company is closing. The business, founded in 1976 by Carol Lipnick and her late husband, Ed Dougherty, has been a fixture of Telegraph Avenue since 1980, and has supplied hats to countless residents, musicians, actors, athletes, Burners, and party-goers.
The store’s motto: “We top ‘em all.”
Dougherty passed away eight years ago, but Lipnick still works six days a week, and is now “ready for a new adventure,” she said.
The store is currently holding a retirement sale until Jan. 31, when the shop will close for good. It will leave a massive top-hat sized hole in the Telegraph Avenue firmament.
Lipnick and Dougherty met in 1973. She was a registered nurse who had just moved to Berkeley from her hometown of New York City, and he had just returned to California after traveling through Central and Southern America, where he “fell in love with Panama hats,” said Lipnick.
Dougherty began importing the hats into the U.S. and Lipnick helped him doll them up, adding ribbons and feathers befitting early 1970s Berkeley fashion. The couple started selling them for $8 each at street fairs and music festivals before opening their first brick and mortar store in 1978 on University Ave. The store relocated to Telegraph in 1980, where it has been ever since.
They outfitted the Straw Hat Band and sold Burning Man tickets and Halloween costumes
Besides Panama hats, the store also carries bowlers, berets, beanies, derbys, fedoras, top hats, pillbox hats, pork pie hats, captain’s hats, sun hats, Kangol hats, ball caps, propeller caps, Irish flat caps, Greek fisherman’s caps, sleeping caps, church hats, Easter hats, Kentucky Derby hats, and virtually any other kind of headwear you can imagine, along with a wide variety of wigs.
Customers shop at Berkeley Hat Company on Saturday, Dec. 13. The store is holding a retirement sale until Jan. 31, when it will close for good. Credit: Nathan Dalton for Berkeleyside
The shop also supplied boaters to the Cal Marching Band’s subgroup, the California Straw Hat Band, and outfitted many theater productions.
For many years, starting in the early 2000s, the store was also the exclusive outlet in the East Bay for Burning Man tickets.
Gina Seghi, a longtime customer, remembers buying tickets at the store for her first Burning Man in 2003.
“You just walked in here and bought them at the counter,” she said on Saturday when she was at the store buying hats for herself and her child, Sebastian. “It was easy. They were cheap. It was great.”
Along with tickets, the Burners would also pick up fabulous hats, colorful wigs, and most importantly, goggles, a must-have for the dust-filled desert playa where the annual festival is held.
“She was the only one at the time that carried goggles,” said Seghi.
The shop also became a popular spot for Halloween costumes, especially in the days before Spirit Halloween and other big box costume stores.
“The fabric of our lives was hats,” said Lipnick and Dougherty’s son, Dylan Dougherty.
Carol Lipnick, owner of Berkeley Hat Company, is retiring after over 50 years of selling hats. Credit: Nathan Dalton for Berkeleyside
He essentially grew up in the store and has fond memories of building forts with his friends out of hatboxes and working side by side with his parents, manning the cash register, helping out customers, and keeping a kid’s watchful eye out for theft.
Not to mention all the colorful characters he met growing up on Telegraph: the Hare Krishnas; the man who would walk in the store and yell “Rare!” before challenging his father to a push-up contest; the man in a wheelchair who had a Dalmatian that would do a little dance if you touched one his spots; and on and on.
“I’m grateful for all the people that came in for all the years in support of my family and enabled us to live a great life,” Dylan said.
‘A portal to the past’ and a weekend hangout spot
Carol Lipnick and Ed Dougherty inside Berkeley Hat Company on the day the store opened on Telegraph Avenue in 1980. Courtesy: Carol Lipnick
Along with headwear, the shop is filled with the detritus of 50 years of doing business, including posters of hat-wearing icons (W.C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable), old family photos, vintage hat posters, and fading hand-written signs admonishing anyone with “oil in her/his hair” to wear a hat protector.
“It’s like a portal to the past,” said Naima Eckhardt de Camargo, who has worked at Berkeley Hat Company for a little over a year, but used to frequent the shop with her friends as a teen growing up in Berkeley.
“Telegraph was the place to hang out on weekends,” she said. “We’d go to the record store and get T-shirts and everything. And then we’d come in here and there’s always music playing and you can look at yourself in the mirror and take photos and selfies and stuff. So it’s a really fun place for the youth.”
The sheer number of hats, displayed from floor to ceiling, is also appealing to Eckhardt de Camargo, in this “era of minimalism.”
“This is the total opposite of that,” she said. “There’s something really artistic about it. It’s beautiful. It’s a mess. It’s a beautiful mess.”
Eckhardt de Camargo is happy for Lipnick to finally be able to retire, but is also sad to lose “one of the old Berkeley relics.”
Berkeley Hat Company will host a last party on the sidewalk
Friends of Berkeley Hat Company hang a banner announcing the store’s retirement sale. Credit: Nathan Dalton for Berkeleyside
In her retirement, Lipnick plans to spend more time with her four grandchildren and visit her sisters in New York. And she also plans to start painting again, a pastime she picked up 25 years ago.
But she doesn’t like to use the “R” word, “retirement.”
“I don’t like to even think of myself really as retiring because I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “But I will be doing something.”
Before she closes the store for good, she’ll tip her hat to the Berkeley community one last time with a big party on the sidewalk in front of the shop. It may be the last time longtime customers will be able to hear one of Lipnick’s favorite jokes:
“Hi Carol, got any hats?” To which she’ll drily reply in her New York accent, “Nope, only shoes.”
Berkeley Hat Company, 2510 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley. Phone: 415-594-0008. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10:30 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sunday, noon-4 p.m. Connect via Instagram and Facebook.
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