Judith M shop
By Ed Avis
Editor’s Note: Regular readers of Costumer magazine know that Judith M Millinery Supply has been a regular advertiser for years. So when Judith Mishler, the owner, told me last year that she had sold her business, I wanted to learn who the new owner was. It took a while to connect, but I’m glad I did! Here’s the story.
Jenny Pfanenstiel came to Chicago in 1998 after earning a costume design degree from the Art Institute of Denver. She designed costumes for the local theater and ballet scene, and for movies filmed in the city. Along the way she fell in love with hats and became a hatmaker – AKA a milliner.
“Eventually making hats became a fulltime thing,” she says. “At one of the art shows that I sold my hats at the person next to me was from Louisville, Kentucky, and she said, ‘Have you thought about making hats for the Derby? You should come to Kentucky next year, stay with me, and sells hats at the Derby.’”
Pfanenstiel took her up on that offer in 2008, and ended up selling her entire stock of hats to boutiques along Louisville’s historic Frankfort Avenue.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this town really loves hats!’” remembers Pfanenstiel, who by then had created a formal business, Formé Millinery (formé is French for “formed”).
The sales were so good in Louisville that she continued making the annual trip for six years, staying four weeks each time. She made custom hats and did trunk shows, which got her name out among hat lovers in the city.
Business in Chicago was solid, too, but she wanted to open a retail store, and rents in prime neighborhoods of Chicago were out of reach. Her husband, Bart Pfanenstiel, owned a small record label in Chicago, WTII Records, but eventually Jenny convinced him that a move to Kentucky would pay off. In 2014 they moved to Louisville, and in 2016 they found a home in LaGrange, a suburb of Louisville. Jenny opened a shop inside a warehouse building that had been converted to artists’ studios.
As she had hoped, the move enhanced her business. Her reputation among hat lovers in the area expanded, and she moved into bigger and bigger spaces within the warehouse building.
“After a while we needed more space but there was nothing bigger there, and then a landlord who has been refurbishing an area of downtown Louisville approached me and said that this is the kind of business he wanted,” Jenny recalls. “He was turning old cottages into retail spaces. It was more money, but a bigger space, which I needed, and it had its own bathroom and electrical outlets that worked! Now I’ve been there almost two years, and it’s been wonderful.”
Bart and Jenny Pfanenstiel
Along the way, Jenny made partnerships with the Kentucky Derby Museum and Churchill Downs. She became the official milliner – a title since changed to “featured milliner” – of Churchill Downs, and she sells her hats in the museum store. She also holds workshops and judges a hat contest. She even wrote a book, “The Making of a Milliner: Hat-Making Projects,” published by Dover Publications in 2015.
“I also create custom hats for the horse owners and things like that,” she says. “And I do a collection for the Derby mansion. That all gives me lots of exposure as being the go-to milliner for a Derby hat.”
OK, all good for Jenny, but now you’re probably wondering, what about her husband Bart? Well, he also plays a key role in this story. See, when Jenny started making hats in Chicago, she bought hat boxes from a company in Canada, because people want nice boxes for fancy hats. But that company went out of business, so Jenny created three templates for hat boxes and contracted with a box manufacturer in New Jersey to make them.
“That worked out great, and then a couple of years later Bart says, ‘Hey, we should try to sell these,’” Jenny says.
No one else was making hat boxes of that quality anymore, so in 2017 the couple launched Hat Boxes USA.
“It took about three months before we got our first order,” remembers Bart, who handles that business (his record label is still in business, but he hasn’t released a new album since 2018). “But then we got on Amazon. Our goal was to pay our monthly sellers fee. The first month we sold two orders, which covered our fees. The third month we had 30 orders, then 40 orders, and after a year 120 orders a month. Now we sell a lot of boxes to theater companies and cruise ships. We’re not quite sure what they use them for. We also are a designated Wayfair vendor – it’s their brand, but we’re the supplier.”
As proof that the hat boxes are high quality and authentic, they can be seen on the TV show beloved by costume designers: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Now we’re getting to the point of this story: How Bart and Jenny ended up with Judith Mishler’s millinery supply company. Jenny and Bart had known Mishler for over a decade and Jenny was a regular customer of hers. They even followed each other on social media.
“She knew we were trying to build something in the millinery industry,” Bart says. “So in 2019 she sent us an email out of the blue saying she wanted to retire and asking if we would be interested in taking over Judith M. I think we caught her off guard when we replied in 30 minutes and said ‘Yes!’”
Of course, with COVID and the other more-typical delays associated with a business acquisition, it took a while to consummate the deal. But finally about a year later the Pfanenstiels became the new owners. They decided to open a retail store for the business – which Mishler had not done – and found a location near their home in LaGrange. It had to be totally renovated, but they managed to open two months prior to the 2021 Derby.
“It was a learning process for sure, but now we’re in full swing,” Jenny says. “Bart works here full time, and Hat Boxes USA is run here. I come here once a week to pay bills and connect with suppliers. We have three employees that help Bart; we couldn’t do this without them.”
The store sells the same millinery supplies that Judith carried before, such as flat materials, hat bodies, ribbons, braids, and trims. But they’ve added some items for area residents making their own Derby hats, such as feathers and flowers. And they sell some finished hats. Jenny says most sales still happen online at Judithm.com, but the retail store is attracting new customers. She is holding workshops in the store, too, which will help increase traffic.
“In the last couple of weeks we’ve seen some milliners traveling here just to shop in the store, the whole tactile thing,” Jenny says. “LaGrange is accessible to Cincinnati and Louisville and Nashville, so we’re in an area you can get to us.”
The bottom line for Jenny and Bart, and hatmakers in general, is that the business continues. Says Jenny: “Judith had been in business for 30 years and we want to continue her legacy.”