A Wool Beanie for the Smallest of Us

We did not set out to make the perfect gift for a newborn, but you quickly turned us on to the idea.

Not long after we started selling the Bay Bee, we started experiencing something curious.

We would get emails with very personal messages — even with the occasional picture from within the delivery room — telling of how they wanted the perfect gift for their newborn, and found our beanie to fulfill that need.

This put a huge smile on our faces!

When a new human life is born into the world, you want something special to gift them, and preferably something useful as well.

It is our honor that our baby beanies fulfill both those criteria.

Why do we use sheep wool?

Our baby beanie is made with sheep wool. The tradition of knitting with sheep wool goes far back into our Norwegian heritage (in fact millenia), and since we are a Norwegian heritage business, it is the only thing that makes sense.

But sheep wool didn’t gain prominence for nothing. And Norwegians have clung to it far after synthetics arrived cheaper and more easily available.

Synthetics just can’t beat the innate properties of wool. Nothing else insulates as well as wool when it is wet or moist. And if there’s something babies in the first two years of life do, it’s getting themselves wet and dirty.

*See puke memory flash across your retina*

Wool is natural. It doesn’t harm the sheep to be sheared. Rather, it harms them not to be sheared. And beside being insulating and natural, it is also warm and comfortable.

So wool has arrived (millennia ago) to stay.

Why do we hand knit everything?

We started Red Hat Factory in 2016, by putting a brand to a much longer history of knitting.

Our grandma began knitting as a 5 year old, in 1932 after learning it from a widow that lived on the attic of the house they stayed in.

Not to say she was a fantastic knitter at age 5, but that’s when it started. The skill has since grown and cascaded down the generations. Red Hat Factory was started by the third generation, Benjamin, when he and his mom developed the first beanie, The Southlander.

The idea of hand knitting was the founding idea of the entire company. All of us have grown up using hand knit wool to protect us through the winters, and the idea of hand knit is strongly associated with family, memories, love and care.

Isn’t it a great fit? Every baby is unique in its way, custom made, knit together using the DNA of two people as threads. And then we have the beanie. Made with organic material, and knit together into beanie shape from a mere thread.