Adam Hats

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Adam Hats Corporation was an American hat maker and retailer founded in 1924 by Elias Lustig. It grew to about 87–97 stores across the United States and sold hats through authorized Adam Hats agents—department stores not owned by the company. They produced budget hats, including the traditional fedora and pork pie hat, and promoted straw hats in late spring. Notable models included The Executive and The Major; The Major was the September hat of the month, priced at $3.25.

Key staff included Frank Moore, the General Sales Manager in the late 1940s and early 1950s; Abraham “Chippy” Levy, head window dresser in 1935, later succeeded by Irving Rubenstein in the late 1940s.

Adam Hats ran extensive advertising and sponsorships. They sponsored boxing broadcasts at Madison Square Garden in New York, with radio announcer Sam Taub. They also sponsored The Strange Dr. Weird on Mutual in 1944–45 and The Mysterious Traveler (1943–1952); many of these programs and Adam Hats commercials survive in archives. Their jingle was “I go for a man who wears an Adam hat.” They produced matchbooks featuring “Sam Taub’s Ring Personalities,” and used items like celebrity photos, magazine ads, radio spots, newsboy aprons, and one of the earliest TV commercials in 1941. In 1942 they ran a matchbook contest offering a free hat.

Store displays were carefully decorated, with stained wood trim on the outside and a bold “Adam” logo.

Lustig sold the company in 1954 to Harold Leitman’s Leitman company. Lustig died in 1958. In 1955 Miller Brothers bought the manufacturing and wholesale segments and moved operations to Dallas, where the old Adam Hats facility became Adam Hats lofts. Benjamin Parrill of Miller Brothers became president in 1955 and died in 2007. In the 1950s, Miller Brothers also issued miniature hat boxes as gift certificates.

Adam Hats appeared in films as well: a quick shot in Cinderella Man (2005) shows an Adam Hats store next to Madison Square Garden, and in Non-Stop New York (1937) the opening scene features an Adam Hats store in Times Square.

In the late 1960s, they released a Cougar-themed hat with a small Mercury Cougar emblem on the hat band.