Design your own hat & choose your own knitting granny

Regular Springwise readers may remember Swiss Netgranny and Danish Mormor.nu, both of which sell knit goods handmade by real-life grandmothers. Now a similar contender has emerged in France that throws some design-your-own flexibility into the mix. Golden Hook is a company that lets customers design their own hat and then choose the grandmother they’d like to knit it. Users begin by selecting the shape of hat they’d like—classic, long or Peruvian, with pompom or without. They can then begin either with a blank hat or one of the site’s existing designs and customize it, knit row by row, by clicking on a region of the hat and then clicking on the colour they’d like that stripe to be. On Peruvian styles they can even choose the hue of the strings by the ears, and for those with simple tastes a “Colour Up” option is available to make the entire hat a single shade. Customers then select their hat size and proceed on to view Golden Hook’s gallery of grandmas, which gives photos and short bios (“married since kindergarten, a former dairywoman, she’s an absolute fan of the Wheel of Fortune,” for example) for each knitter in the company’s employ. After choosing the one they’d like to knit their hat, customers can send her a message and can even request that she sign her name on the hat’s label. Pricing begins at EUR 42. In this era of anonymous, distant mass production, there’s nothing like knowing (and being able to share) the product life story of a locally handmade good (one that’s (still) made here, as our sister site would say) to make a consumer value it more—and be willing to shell out more to get it. Plenty more opportunities where this one came from, too. Get those knitting needles started! 😉 (Related: Full provenance sweaters.) Spotted by: Marc Raynaud