Village Hat Shop owner Fred Belinsky was one of the first — if not the first — tenant in Seaport Village, opening up shop at the bayside location in 1980 one month prior to the grand opening of the village itself. The former university instructor moved his wife, golden retriever and three-month-old son across the country from Michigan to bargain on a business venture that he originally knew little about, only that it was wildly successful at the time. “Hats were selling well nationally in 1979 and 1980,” he said. “Specifically, Western hats were hot. The TV show ‘Dallas’ and the John Travolta movie ‘Urban Cowboy’ were driving cowboy clothing, hats included.” After only one short year of selling cowboy hats like crazy, “it happened,” he said. “It’s legendary in the hat industry. One day in April 1981, people stopped buying Western-style hats. It was as if an announcement came down from the heavens, ‘Ye shall not buy a cowboy hat.’” And then, it was over. Well, just the cowboy hat phase. Belinsky, the son of a merchant, knew that fads fade and he would have to roll with the tide. “The good news was that my location, Seaport Village, was a winner,” he said. “The bad news was that the décor of the shop, the hand-carved cowboy hat signs, the business cards and letterhead, the fixtures, the inventory — all that I knew about hats — was built around a single style that was no longer selling.” So he became immersed in the hat world, checking out merchandise at the Los Angeles Mart, flying to trade shows across the country and walking the streets in New York City’s millinery district finding out everything he possibly could about the accessory he was determined to sell. He and his wife, Tina, even traveled to China, Korea and Ecuador to check out hat manufacturing hubs around the globe. He changed the Western theme of the store to include a wider variety of styles ranging from sophisticated to silly. By 1997, he had four stores in California, a couple of warehouses and was testing out a new sales channel via the Internet. Belinsky attributes part of the Village Hat Shop’s success to the wide variety of styles offered by his shop — more than 1,000 different styles, not including colors and sizes. “This breadth of selection, an early core value, is not the only thing that distinguishes us from the pack. One important difference is that we are for real. You know this when you come to our store,” he said. “We know our products and we know the fundamentals of being good merchants.”