RETAIL TRADE: A Hat Is a Hat Is a …

If any U.S. male needs proof that women’s hats are crazy—and that men get stuck for them—Benjamin Benedict Greenfield of Chicago is the man to see for evidence. At his Bes-Ben hat shop on Chicago’s plush North Michigan Avenue, he has sold hats with everything on them from dish mops to jewels at a minimum price of $37.75, and an alltime high of $1,000 (complete with an emerald and ruby brooch). Last week, suave, dark-eyed Ben wowed the ladies again with a fashion show for Chicago’s pet society charity, St. Luke’s Hospital. In the solemn spirit of wartime rationing, every Bes-Ben hat was made of kitchen utensils.

There was a Dutch cap made of a kitchen towel, trimmed with four napkin rings, a cookie cutter and a tea strainer. There was a tricorn glittering with plastic cutlery, grapefruit knives and ice tongs, and a hat of a sponge pierced with iced-tea spoons. The queer fact about these hats was that they were all becoming. Ben says: “The sale is made in the mirror.”

Ben makes money. In his highceilinged, mirrored French salon, the average sale is “over $50” and the volume runs from 10-40 hats a day. His list of customers reads like an amalgam of the Social Register, Variety and Who’s Who in Commerce & Industry*. In search of new ideas, he has made 40 European junkets, six trips to the Orient and four around the world.

Besides miniature bananas, palm trees and pedigreed dogs, Ben has also trimmed hats with models of penguins, reindeer, Ferdinand the Bull, Red Cross nurses, Chinese coolies with water jugs, and nude “Folies-Bergère” dancers. He is already planning for the 1944 elections: hats trimmed with elephants and donkeys. But his biggest innovation for the out-of-this-world hat business is his refusal to sell any hat exclusively.

For this bluff treatment of the women who pay $37.75 and up for a hat, Ben is rewarded with fawning affection. Last Easter 22 of his clients were so grateful that they threw a surprise cocktail party for him in his shop, complete with hors d’oeuvres from his own hat boxes, passed around by their assembled chauffeurs.

Ben Greenfield got his start 27 years ago in a $5-a-week selling job for a shopkeeper friend of his mother’s. Three years later he opened his own shop with his sister (the “Bess” of Bes-Ben, now married and out of the business). Two years after that he had gone from one employe and a $35 rent bill to 22 and $350.

Now he can afford to be offhand about his business—and to turn down dizzying Manhattan and Hollywood offers. When his clients ask him why he does not open more shops, he merely drawls: “What for? I’m in the wrong income bracket now.”

*Such as:. Mrs. Philip Armour Jr., Mrs. Donald Allison, Mrs. Cyrus Adams (see cut).