Chapter 1: "The Feather Hat"

Collaborators: Tribal Printing/Dark Roast Digital

Project: "The Feather Hat"

We wanted our very first design to be special. "The Feather Hat" was a vision I had even before I decided to start a local apparel company. Before RARE, I can remember sitting around with friends (over some wobbly-pops) and spit-balling ideas about the various types of local businesses we would like to open. We discussed the usual ideas such as: bars, restaurants, cafes, etc. Throughout these brain-storming sessions I always said that if I were to open a local business, I'd incorporate the Feather Hat into it somehow - a truly recognizable symbol of Windsor.

The design started with a hand-drawn picture in my "ideas book". With my extremely limited graphic design experience (and I mean that literally), I created mouse-drawn mock-up the design in Microsoft Paint.  This gave us a pretty good idea of how we wanted it to look on a shirt. The result was this:

From here, it was evident that we needed some help with the graphic design element. Enter Tribal Printing and Dark Roast Digital. We approached Mike at Tribal with our idea and he put us in contact with Greg over at Dark Roast. The rest was history. Greg drew up a mock up vector file (arguably slightly better than our original) and Mike put the design into print. The end result was this:

We've been working with both Tribal Printing and Dark Roast Media ever since this day. We're happy to have developed a great relationship with both companies and look forward to working with them on many future projects.

About the Design

Many people recognize "The Feather Hat" as a symbol of Windsor. But what many don't know is what the colours and feathers represent.

• The 4 feathers represent each letter of RARE. Remember: RARE also stands for "Real Authentic. Real Etiquette.
• Each of the 4 feather colours can be found in the City of Windsor's Coat of Arms as seen below:

Check out the link for more info about Windsor's Coat of Arms. It's an interesting read!