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“Don’t pinch the crown like the British do, or
you’ll break it,” said Jenny Tzaig. ”Hold it by
the brim and your Panama will last for years.”
She was surrounded by Panama hats of every
shape, size, style and colour: not just the
close-woven Panama trilby sought by a cricket
umpire in a popular TV advertisement, but women’s
bowlers and sun hats, fancy patterned hats in open
weave, even baseball caps. Plying journalists and
hat makers with ideas, she has helped to make
Panamas fashionable. “Now I’ve tackled men’s’
Panamas,” she says “I’m trying to develop into
ladies'”
For 12 years she worked at Ecuador’s London
embassy, seeking markets for Ecuadorian goods. Now
she handles about three-fifths of the Panamas made
by Ecuadorian country people and imported into
Britain. Eight years ago she got Christys of
Stockport to take 200 dozen. This year it will be
7,500 dozen, many sold at £18-20 by Marks and
Spencer for whom Panamas have become a
bestseller.
This trade is on commission, saving her the need
to finance it. But she imports for 35 to 40 smaller
customers through her own firm, Walker Majesa.
‘Majesa’ combines the names of her three daughters,
Mavi (an Oxford student who has opened nurseries
for street children in Ecuador), Jessica (studying
for GCSE) and Sally (a Leeds student who has worked
in Ecuador with disabled children).
Jenny Tzaig was born in Ecuador, one of the
first countries to admit Jews seeking refuge from
Hitler. Her father, an Austrian agricultural
engineer, settled in Quito.
At 15 she visited Israel and stayed on, training
as a nurse. She also met her husband, Boaz Tzaig, a
London fashion student who became an interior
designer.
Panama hats take their name from the Canal,
because many canal builders wore them. But they are
from Ecuador, made from strands drawn from the
young shoots of a coastal palm tree. A bygone
government spread hat making from the coast up into
the Andes around the town of Cuenca.
Both men and women weave hats when they are not
busy farming: a hat takes from one or two days to
three months for the finest quality. They sell the
hats surrounded with unwoven strands, and small
factories get the edges plaited by outworkers.
Children gather discarded strand-ends and weave
them into tiny hats for sale to tourists. In the
Cuenca factories, the hats are washed, bleached or
coloured, and hammered to produce the Panama’s
characteristic smooth texture. In Britain, Christys
other factories give them their final shape.
Jenny Tzaig has studied whether this finishing
work could be done in Ecuador but the transport
costs are against it. ‘Hoods’ (unfinished hats) can
be packed in a small space, one inside the other.
Finished hats would need bulky individual
packing.
After she left the embassy, a Cuenca firm called
Paredes asked her to be its British agent. “Once I
went to see how the weavers worked, I fell in love
with the product and the people,” she says.
Jenny now buys from six firms but refused to
deal with two that failed to pay their hat
weavers.
Weavers bring their hats into town on their
backs when they come to Sunday service in Cuenca. A
nun who belongs to the Paredes family arranged for
her convent to buy the hats at fair prices.
Unfortunately, this system has not yet extended to
other areas.
Jenny Tzaig visits Ecuador regularly, linking
weavers and customers, suggesting designs. She got
the head of Christys to go there, too. Every hat
may be different, but customers require consistent
quality, so techniques to ensure quality have been
developed. This has its reward in bigger orders
which mean the weavers can work all the year
round.
Jenny Tzaig says she is not an altruist, “I am
doing a business – but with a bit of heart”.
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