Dedicated to my older brother Fred Weiner. Fred passed away way too young on May 18, 2020, from a rare form of cancer. He was and will always be an inspiration for me and our whole family. His love of hats was well known to all that had the chance to meet him. In fact, he had a custom license plate made that said, “My Hats”. Throughout his lifetime of travel, Fred would find an interesting hat to bring home.

Top Hat Solutions is named after Fred’s most prized hat his Top Hat that he found while traveling in London early in his life.

Fred was a born leader of people with an extraordinarily strong desire to help others and to organize everything. He was always in charge of what we did when we went on vacation with a little checklist of items that we needed to complete that day. At work, this organizational desire took him far. His most rewarding accomplishment was starting up DragonFly Forest, a camp for kids with medical needs that allowed these kids to have fun and just be a kid in a safe and loving environment.

We hope you enjoy the many hats that Fred collected throughout his travels. May this be a small remembrance of an incredibly talented and caring individual who thought of others first and foremost.

Sherlock’s unmistakeable deerstalker hat was never mentioned in the printed words of the Holmes books. When Sidney Paget illustrated Doyle’s story, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, for publication in The Strand Magazine in 1891, he gave Sherlock a deerstalker hat and an Inverness cape, and the look was forevermore a must for distinguished detectives—so much so that while the deerstalker was originally meant to be worn by hunters (hence the name), the hat now connotes detective work, even without a detective’s head inside it.