PrairieCast Pull Quote: ‘Acquired 400 hats…from the Iowa Hat Lady’

This week on PrairieCast, Josh Cramer, founder of Iowa City-based Cramer Dev, talked about his company’s recent social experiment, “The Sweet Hat Club.” According to Cramer, The Sweet Hat Club idea was conceived by Colin Curtin, one of Cramer Dev’s software engineers, who mentioned over the company chat, “Hey, I’m starting a hat club …

“They acquired this 400 hat collection from – I didn’t even know this woman existed – The Iowa Hat Lady, who was retiring and had to get rid of her hats, you know how it goes.”  

Josh Cramer of Cramer Dev

User-submitted photos are featured on the homepage of The Sweet Hat Club. Screenshot from sweethatclub.org.

This week on PrairieCast, Josh Cramer, founder of Iowa City-based Cramer Dev, talked about his company’s recent social experiment, “The Sweet Hat Club.”

According to Cramer, The Sweet Hat Club idea was conceived by Colin Curtin, one of Cramer Dev’s software engineers, who mentioned over the company chat, “Hey, I’m starting a hat club.” Soon after, the team started sharing photos of themselves in hats, one person then grabbed a domain, another team member built a website, someone else composed a theme song, stickers were made to be handed out at South by Southwest Interactive this past March and the project was born.

(Cramer, left, photo from sweethatclub.org)

Sometime later they were approached by the Iowa Children’s Museum, who had recently received a donation of 400 hats, to create an exhibit for The Sweet Hat Club.

The Cramer Dev team helped create a photobooth at the Museum and kids today can choose a hat, get their picture taken, then see it online at sweethatclub.org/kids.

It’s a “fun briding-the-gap between virtual and real life experiment for us,” said Cramer.

For more on this project, tune it at the 4:00 minute mark in this week’s PrairieCast.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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