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The original location of The Mod Hatter, 1992.
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Jay and Robert Berman making the original dreadlock hats in 1993.
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Big Daddy Zebra and Girl
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Jodi, Tina and Robert at the Halloween Show in Chicago in 1993
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Tina and Robert at the 1993 Chicago Halloween Show
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Robert and Tina dress up
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The Berman Family
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Gritty Fam
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Rasta Imposta only Logo
Editor’s Note: NCA Executive Director Ed Avis recently interviewed Robert and Tina Berman, who own Rasta Imposta, a costume manufacturer and NCA Vendor Member. This “first-person” article is based on that interview.
Robert: The crazy ski hat trend was growing just as I graduated from Middlebury College in 1989, and my sister Jodi and I decided to make novelty ski hats. The Bob Marley “Legend” album was popular around that time and I got the idea to make a hat with dreadlocks. I made the dreadlocks with wool and glued them into a baseball hat. I took the hats to bars on Long Beach Island, where I was living at the time, and sold them for $20. I was really planning on being a playwright, and had started writing a play, but I also loved being an entrepreneur.
Around that same time Tina had opened The Mod Hatter, an outdoor pushcart at Schooner’s Wharf that sold decorative and novelty hats. One day my dad saw her cart and went up to her and said, “You should buy these dreadlock hats my son makes.” He was just being silly, but eventually Tina and I met and we started dating. In 1993 we went to the Halloween show in Chicago, and the dreadlock hat was the hit of the show.
Tina: The reason the hats did well at that first show was that it was that time in the world when people liked the idea that they could just wear their regular clothes and throw on a hat and they’d be in a costume. Rental costumes were still huge in those days, and there was a need for something easier. So here we were in our early 20s and we brought something fresh and different to the show. The attendees, including a lot of NCA members, became our customers.
In those days we made everything in New Jersey. We hired some young guys to help us make the dreadlocks. It was a felting process. We bought wool from a wool processor, had it dyed, and then scrubbed it to make the dreadlocks shape. Then we took them to a laundromat to dry and shrink the wool. We were ruining the laundromats’ dryers by clogging them up! Eventually we bought our own commercial dryer.
Some customers said, “If you’re doing the hat, can you do the rest of the outfit?” So we added a funky vest to the dreadlocks and added a muumuu to our granny hat, which was a hat with fake hair and purple curlers.
My parents owned a party rental store in Pennsylvania that had a costume department, so I grew up in this business. We asked them for advice about what would sell well, and that’s when we made the first pimp suit. It was made with upholstery fabric, and really changed the market.
Then one of the big companies knocked off our pimp suit with a much cheaper version. We were manufacturing everything in New Jersey at the time, so we kind of turned to each other and said, “We have to look for overseas manufacturing or we will go out business.” That was a turning point for us.
Robert: Getting knocked off like that was a real challenge. I was always worried about our competitors doing that. But I credit Louis Klaitman of Lookinglass, our first sales rep, for giving me some advice in that regard that I still keep. He said, “If you’re in a running race and you’re always looking over your shoulder, you’ll never win.” That advice has stuck with us. We’re always looking forward. It’s always a challenge to get knocked off, but we move on and look to the finish line and create something new. That’s been our mantra.
Ironically, the company in Hong Kong that makes our products now was knocking off one of our products when we met them. I had visited the booth of the Hong Kong Trade Commission at the Toy Show and filled out a card that I wanted to have our costumes made there. I got an email from a company, and the rep said he knew our product and showed us some of his product. One of them was the knockoff of our pimp suit! They were a young company looking to grow, and we were quickly able to legitimize each other. That was about 1999 or 2000. They’re still our main supplier.
Tina: We get our ideas by looking at pop culture and what’s going on in the world, what people find currently funny. Robert and I constantly talk to our children, who are 12 and 14, and they help keep us in tune. It’s amazing to watch the creativity of the next generation come out.
When my daughter Charlotte was 7 she came to dinner one night and said, “I think you should make a giant mustache with a wire in it that lets you bend it to any shape.” We said, “That’s a really good idea.” She goes to bed and Robert goes back to work and comes back home at 10:30 and runs into Charlotte’s room wearing a 6-foot mustache and says, “Charlotte, I made this prototype and we’re going to get a patent on this!” So before her 8th birthday she got a patent, and we’ve sold 80,000 of them.
We love making things that are nostalgic, that create an emotional response in people. We’ve made a lot of costumes of basic products – like a banana and a hot dog. And we’ve made a lot of licensed costumes from brand name products, like Heinz Ketchup and Hershey’s Chocolate. Our licensing guy has a lot of integrity and good relationships, so he helps bring in these offers. Now national brands come to us because they know we are the best ones for those kinds of costumes. If they’re trying to decide between us and a major, they know that if they go with us their products won’t be buried in the back of the catalog.
We also have had movie and TV show licenses, like the movie Ted and the TV show Seinfeld. I think they have a different agenda from the food brands. The food brands are not as interested in making a ton of money, but they’re very interested in how the product looks and whether it represents the brand well. So we pay particular attention to the colors and trademarks and things like that. I have an architectural background and understand the transition from 2D to 3D. That’s helpful on the sculptural stuff, to make it look like it’s supposed to look.
Today we have 13 employees. Robert’s sister Jodi is a partner, and we have designers, a CFO and a bookkeeper. At one point around 2011 we had about 50 people, but the changing economy and the internet really affected us. We had to rethink and regroup to stick around. We began a relationship with Morris Costumes around 2015. We closed our warehouses and Morris is our sole distributor. We design and market the products and Morris distributes them. It’s been a win win for everybody.
At the end of the day laughter is what’s important, especially with all the craziness in the world. The products we make ultimately make people laugh, and that’s what keeps us going.