When Hailee Hampton launched Hurry Slow Hat Co., she wasn’t following a carefully mapped-out business plan. She was following a creative instinct—and a willingness to learn through trial and error.
Today, the Littleton-based company is known for its distinctive outdoor-inspired hats and growing wholesale business, but the journey began with a young designer living in Colorado working long hours in the brewery industry and dreaming of building something of her own.
Hampton, a graduate of Parsons School of Design with a BFA in fashion design, initially designed bags during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hampton invested her savings, about $10,000 accumulated during the pandemic, into inventory. The products were well-designed, but the business model was not.
“My cost was too high, and I definitely lost money on the bags,” she says. “It wasn’t until my third year that I started to turn a profit, and I made a lot of mistakes.”
When Hampton returned to NH, she moved into a two-bedroom apartment and transformed the spare room into her first studio while continuing to wait tables to support herself. Along the way, she discovered that her strengths weren’t just in fashion design but also in graphics, branding and storytelling.
“The bags didn’t do well for me, but the hats just took off,” she says. Her hats come in a variety of designs, including one depicting Franconia Notch, lupine, a ski lift, Mount Washington (dubbed ‘The Rockpile’), and a barn quilt design.
That creative approach helped distinguish Hurry Slow from competitors. Rather than relying on generic designs, Hampton created products that reflected NH’s outdoor culture in a fresh way.
“The stuff I make is New Hampshire without being New Hampshire with a moose. It’s celebrating New Hampshire in a more colorful and creative way,” she says.
A pivotal moment came after Hampton married her husband, Luke. The couple decided to spend 13 months living in a van and traveling the country, visiting outdoor recreation hubs and pitching retailers face-to-face. They walked into hundreds of stores, hearing more rejections than approvals.
“We heard so many ‘nos,’” Hampton recalls. “But we did get our hats into
50 stores.”
The road trip became an invaluable market research project. The couple observed successful retailers, gathered customer feedback and identified what worked with outdoor enthusiasts across the country. “That was some of the best research we could have done,” Hampton says.
After returning to NH, the company opened its first storefront in Bethlehem before relocating to a larger space in Littleton earlier this year. Today, about half of the company’s revenue comes from brick-and-mortar sales, with online wholesale accounting for roughly 35% and online retail making up the remainder.
“When I first started, I was going to sell everything online,” she says. “It flopped. Once I started getting products in front of people, that’s when things really started
to happen.”
