Earlier this week Richard told me that we had a visit from a local hardware store owner, out of our county. As Richard put it, he wanted to see that Chicken hat that everyone was talking about. Wow! I was blown away!!!

Working towards a great logo can be daunting for a new business. A great logo is one of the biggest marketing tools that can connect your customers to your store/brand.

As new business owners, we did get some great advice from fellow business owners to be very purposeful when selecting colors and a logo to connect to our customers and our store. We have tried to heed this great advice, and have used our great neighbors down the street, Cook’s Inc to help us through the process.

Over the last few years, we have really stuck with a classic gray color for a branding color. Why??? Many reasons actually—-our store has concrete floors, which has served many purposes in our building- chicken processing plant, & as a hardware store. I think that the gray is a great compliment to that old rustic hardware store feel as well, so the color is ours to stay.

Back to the chicken hat… The story of the Chicken Hat is a journey of logo selection over the last few years. We have been working diligently with our neighbors down the street- Cook’s Inc, to select a great logo for a baseball cap 🧢. Our initial designs were very simple with the gray cap and a patch logo with our store name.

Brooke, who works for Cook’s, always challenges me to keep taking our logo to the next level. So as we were meeting one afternoon, we came up with a new design… a chicken, with red, white, blue flag inside it. The hat is of course that dark classic gray… (our best seller)

How did we arrive at this? We were trying to connect our logo hat to our store history. In the end, Richard and I have been super pleased with this new hat. I think we have achieved success with this new logo hat.

As I write this, we have chicken hats that have traveled all over the United States, and Australia. Even our local state legislator wears his to Raleigh and has gotten several great compliments on his hat. Of course, I keep telling him— tell the story about your hat… Our legacy of our store can be told and shared.

Here is our story…

Our building dates back to the early 1900’s. The building was used as a poultry processing plant for turkeys, chickens, etc. These animals were literally herded down the mountain and pushed into our store and processed. They were then loaded up on the railroad, which is just down the street and taken out of town. High estimates are close to 1 million chickens & turkeys were processed in our building in a years time at the height of production.

Maybe it is sometimes the story that helps you brand yourself, maybe it is the story that folks will remember… it could be a little bit of both.

I’m not sure if our neighbor hardware store really found what he needed the other day…. what the deal is with that chicken hat, but we sure love it here at Wilkes County Hardware. I hope his curiosity was satisfied.