Often the best brands are born from ingenuity – one individual creating something purely to make their lives easier. Yvon Chouinard created his own pitons that laid the foundations for Patagonia. Carhartt was created out of a need for hardwearing overalls for railroad workers. Seattle-based brand KAVU was also founded with the intention of making owner, Barry Barrs, life that little bit less complicated and it all started with a hat.
KAVU is an acronym for “clear above visibility unlimited” but with K replacing C, this was a saying that Barry picked up when he was working as a commercial fisherman in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Alaska is to fishermen, what Yosemite is to climbers, as it has the largest sockeye salmon return in the world.
By the age of 16 Barry was captaining his own first commercial fishing boat, this involvement with fishing continued through his college years and he was starting to make pretty good money.
One thing that Barry realised whilst working on the boats was that his hat collection was shrinking, rapidly. When the weather was quite the opposite of KAVU, Barr’s hats were being swept straight off his head and into the ocean. The flimsy construction was simply not good enough.
This led Barr to take matters into his own hands and in 1989 he began designing his own cap. He was originally inspired by Teva, who had begun using jacquard webbing in their sandals. Impressed with the durability and hardwearing properties of the material, Barry sought to construct a cap with webbing that ran around the crown of the head to minimise the chances of the cap blowing off. Barr also replaced the standard polyester build of a cap with 10 oz duck canvas to ensure that there was no chance of it tearing in harsh conditions. Finally, in place of a tightening strap, was a hefty buckle closure system.
In 1993 Barry had more or less perfected the Strapcap design and began selling them out of his car. They became such a hit with sailors, climbers and outdoors people in general that he quickly realised he had to up production. Thankfully for him, he was in the right place at the right time for sewing hardwearing caps.
During the 1970s and 80s Seattle had a large textiles industry, in an interview with Propermag in 2023, Barr said:
“You’d go into these houses, and in the garage Vietnamese or Cambodian families would be working and they’d produce like 10,000 Jansport backpacks, which is just crazy.”
Due to the large-scale production of clothing in the city, families had access to heavy-duty sewing machines that could go through cordura, which turned out to be paramount, as the 10 oz duck canvas Barry was using was too thick for run-of-the-mill sewing machines. After approaching one such family and presenting a large portion of the money he made whilst on the boats, the first Strapcaps underwent production.
Barr then drafted a sell sheet and harassed every outdoor shop within a 30-mile radius and slowly, but surely, Strapcaps made their way onto the rails.
Fast-forward 30-something years and the Strapcap is now a staple and firm favourite amongst outdoor types and non-outdoor types. Whether you’re sailing, standing atop a mountain, riding a bike or conducting any activity where the windspeed might be north of 15mph, the Strapcap still remains the most likely piece of headwear to stay on.
The Strapcap has not gone the way of many other items that receive mass popularity, in terms of a quality hit, if anything, they’re being made better than ever. The brims are now constructed of heat-laminated polyurethane and canvas, instead of the regular cardboard and polyester. Each cap features five bar tacks (a really solid kind of stitch) across its weakest points and yes, all of them are still produced in the United States of America.
In a 2018 YouTube video, Barr stated that KAVU had never had a Strapcap returned due to it falling apart. We can’t verify for sure if that’s still the case, but we’d be very surprised if it wasn’t.
Strapcaps have evolved significantly since 1993, but retain all of the key features that make them just so great. They now come in a host of different fabrics, colours and shapes. Some have vents, some are made of fleece and some are even bucket hats.
All these new varieties of Strapcap hold testament to the ingenuity of Barr’s original design, purely birthed because he was sick of his hat being eaten by the same fish he was trying to catch.
If you fancy purchasing one of these fantastic pieces of kit, you can do so through one of these purveyors of fine headwear, Outsiders Store, Working Class Heroes.
