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Kemo Sabe Has Been the Hottest Ticket in the Mountains for Years. Here's What's Actually Behind That.
Kemo Sabe hats have become the it-piece of every mountain town. Here's the real story behind the craft, the growth, and why the brand keeps its edge.
This past weekend we were in Aspen for the JAS festival — three days of great music, the perfect backdrop, and a town that puts on a show for itself in the best possible way. The mountains, the manicured downtown, the private jets lined up at the airfield — the town has its own pomp and circumstance. And it feels exclusive just standing in it, before you've spent a dollar on anything. Kemo Sabe sits inside that feeling and sells you a way to take a piece of it home.
On Friday, the store was in the middle of hosting a private party for a wedding group, and they still made room for us — a few minutes' wait for a salesperson to be free, and we were in. That's a nice thing to be able to say about a store this busy. Every hat bar station was full, every mirror was taken, the boot wall had people three deep in front of it. Kemo Sabe just moves at that pace.
It wasn't just Aspen, either. Kemo Sabe runs six stores now — Aspen, Vail, Park City, Jackson Hole, Whitefish, and Round Top, Texas — and three of them happened to be on my route this past week: Park City, Vail, and Aspen. Every single one was the busiest, most energized shop on its street. Different towns, different crowds, same result. That's not a one-off festival weekend. That's just what this brand does right now, across its whole footprint. Owner Wendy Kunkle isn't shy about it, either — she told WWD the Aspen flagship, all 1,700 square feet of it, still runs a rope line at the door: "We had two-hour lines this Christmas." That's honestly a lot of demand for any brand to manage well, no matter the price point.
Which raises a fair question: at beaver-felt prices, before you've even added a band, is it still exclusive when this many people, in three different towns, are wearing some version of the same hats? I don't think that has a clean yes-or-no answer. But watching three stores in three towns move like that, my honest read is that it isn't really about everyone owning the same hat. It's that everyone wants to be part of the same story. A Kemo Sabe hat isn't just a piece you bought — it's a marker that says you were there, at that scene, in that town, during that particular stretch of summer. That's a harder thing for a brand to build than scarcity, and it's also a more fragile one. You can manufacture scarcity with a price tag. A shared identity, people have to actually want to keep joining — and a brand this visible has to keep earning that every season, not just coast on it.
The Real Product Isn't the Hat — It's the Experience
The craft backs it up. Beaver felt sits at the top of the price range and and the store has clearly moved upmarket across the board — this isn't an entry-level souvenir shop. Bands run from a simple ribbon up to leather, silver, and hand-tooled pieces that can run into the thousands. Add branding (burned initials, symbols, full phrases), steaming, shaping, and a roughly 45-minute build process, and you're not buying a hat off a shelf. You're buying a personalized, genuinely theatrical retail experience that happens to end with a hat on your head — and that's the part that's actually hard to copy.
And it's not just hats. Kemo Sabe builds custom boots the same way — pick your own leather, your own details, your own branding, and build a pair that's genuinely yours rather than pulled off a shelf. That's the same personalization instinct applied to a completely different category, and it's a big part of why the experience holds up: the hat bar isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how this store thinks about everything it sells.
What Makes Each One Feel Like Yours
Walk the hat wall and it's mostly two names: Kemo Sabe's own Grit line and Stetson — a name that's been making hats in America since 1865, about as close to a canonical Western hat maker as exists. Grit isn't outsourced. Kemo Sabe owns its own factories — one in Gainesville, Texas, for hats and silver, another in El Paso for boots and leather goods. Kunkle put it plainly to WWD: "It's hard to rely on vendors. You never know if you're going to get something." That's a genuinely rare level of control for a brand this size, and it's the real reason the customization feels bespoke instead of gimmicky — they're not just finishing someone else's product, they're building it start to finish, then shaping, branding, and personalizing it in front of you. Borrow the best materials the industry has where it makes sense, build the rest yourself, and make the finishing touch the whole story.
It also helps that the person running it came up through the store rather than a boardroom, and that this isn't a case of new owners inheriting someone else's viral moment. Kunkle was already the general manager back in 2017, when Kemo Sabe outfitted Victoria's Secret's holiday campaign — Michael Bay directing, Russell James shooting, pulling straight from the store's own inventory. It was already a three-store, nationally visible brand by then. She bought the company with her brother Bobby in 2020, after the founders decided to sell — reportedly after private equity passed on backing her — and took it from there to six stores, its own factories, and a much bigger stage. Same person, growing role, the whole way through. That's the kind of continuity that's hard to manufacture, and it shows up in how she talks about the brand: "We're ready for any trend or curve or change. We're not going to change who we are."
Western wear is having a real moment, and Kemo Sabe is one piece of a much bigger, genuinely exciting story. Burns 1876 is still turning out beautiful fur-felt hats and bands from their own facility in Salina, Utah, since 1876. Lucchese has been handcrafting boots in San Antonio since 1883. Tecovas took the direct-to-consumer model and turned it into a real Western wear growth story of its own, going from one store to dozens in a few years. Double D Ranch has been doing its own eclectic, unmistakably Western take on women's apparel out of Seguin, Texas, since 1990. And even Ralph Lauren has leaned hard back into it — RRL's recent collections read like a love letter to the same Western aesthetic everyone's chasing right now. There's room in this category for a lot of different kinds of great, and it's a genuinely good time to be in it.
Shaboozey Made the Store Part of His Set
Kemo Sabe's rise has been fueled by exactly the kind of visibility you can't buy — Rihanna, Shania Twain, the Kardashians, and a steady stream of Hollywood clientele the owners say found the brand organically rather than through outreach. That's the kind of love money can't manufacture, and I watched it happen live this weekend. Shaboozey played the JAS festival Saturday night, and used his own trip to Kemo Sabe earlier that day as the lead-in to "Cowgirl" — talking about the crowd he'd found in the store before the song even started. Then he had the entire audience raise their cowboy and cowgirl hats in the air while he played it. A field full of people, most of them in some version of the exact hat I'd just watched everyone shopping for on Galena Street, all raising them together on cue.
That's not something a brand can script. It's what happens when a store becomes part of a town's actual culture instead of just a place to shop in it.
Where the Momentum Could Go Next
Every brand riding a wave this big eventually has to think about what's next — the hat can't be the only reason people walk in forever, and the smart ones start building the second act while the first one's still working. Kemo Sabe is clearly already doing that: a 12-piece Western womenswear collaboration with Abercrombie & Fitch, and now Original Grit Tequila, taking the Grit name off the hat wall and into an entirely different category. Kunkle's own read on it: "We're always looking for that vertical moment, but in a slow, thoughtful way." That's the right instinct — expand the name, not just the store count.
I'd add two things to that list. First, keep leaning on the infrastructure they've already got — Aspen and Vail both have private rooms built for hosting, Park City has its own hidden speakeasy that's available for buyouts, and strategically curated pop-ups are planned around events - so as demand for events keep climbing, that energy has somewhere to go besides the middle of the hat bar. Second, I'd keep building out the vintage and specialty-craft assortment they've already started. It's a great complement to the hats, gives loyal customers another reason to come back between custom orders, and leans on the kind of buying eye this team clearly already has. Bringing that same customization energy to one-of-a-kind pieces — a branded vintage buckle, a reworked jacket, styling built around a specific piece — would give the store another category that's every bit as personal as the hat bar, and just as hard for anyone else to replicate.
And as Ketchum opens next spring — Bobby Kunkle, the co-owner, is targeting around April 2027 — that'll make seven towns with the same thing Aspen, Vail, Park City, Jackson Hole, Whitefish, and Round Top already have: a store that turns a hat into a piece of the trip.
This is exactly the kind of growth story I love working through with clients at Framework Fashion — real demand, matched with an experience built to keep getting better as it scales. If you're building something people already can't get enough of, let's talk about what comes next.
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