Gay Stonehouse has gone into business for herself, marketing the hat box she’s designed.

    It’s constructed of co-polyester resin and stainless steel, with a bit of satin rat tail thrown in for good measure. It has six sides, with a pyramidal top and base. And it’s the modern, practical, solution to the age old problem of hat storage.

    The Millinery Vault is a hat box with a difference. The innovative design, patented in both Canada, and the U.S. offers all the advantages of old fashioned hat boxes, without the disadvantages.  As with other hat boxes, the Millinery Vault keeps hats dust free, and makes for easier storage, and transporting of your favorite head gear, but that’s where the similarities end.

    Unlike the old style hat boxes, the Millinery Vault is designed to help the hat keep its original shape. The hat sits on the Vault’s lower pyramid, keeping the brim suspended above the bottom of the case.   

    Another advantage of the Millinery Vault over those old boxes is that the Vault is made of clear plastic, enabling you to see exactly which hat is in which box.    The Millinery Vault is also more compact than the old style hat boxes. The pyramid design on both the top and bottom of the Vault means the boxes fit nicely on top of each other, making for easy stacking.

    The Millinery Vault - a relatively new product on the market - is the brainchild of Patricia Gay Stonehouse, who’s taken the product from the conceptualization stage to finished product and is now beginning to market her creation.

    This is Stonehouse’s first foray into the entrepreneurial world. A Manotick resident who grew up in the village, her background is in early childhood education - having attended the Early Childhood Education program at Algonquin College, and earning a degree in Linguistics from Carleton University. Currently, Stonehouse works mornings with a Senior kindergarten at Greely Public School, and dedicates afternoons to getting her new business off the ground.

    As is the case with many new products, Stonehouse designed the Millinery Vault to provide a solution for a problem she faced. She owns a number of hats, and was running into a storage problem.

    After placing ads in the paper, looking to buy old fashioned hat boxes, she managed to track down and purchase about a dozen. But once she had her hats safely stored away, she couldn’t tell which hat was in which box. She tried to solve that problem by color coding the boxes using string matching the color of the hat, but even that only worked when she had only one hat in each color.

    Although the idea of creating a new and improved hat box design has been on Stonehouse’s mind for about 8 years, the actual product has only been on the market since late 1989. A lot of time went into the product’s design, with everything from selection of the right material for the box, to working out the proper dimensions. This involved much thought and not a little trial and error.

    Stonehouse knew she wanted her hat box design to be constructed of a clear plastic, but finding a supplier who could provide plastic with the right texture and thickness wasn’t easy. Stonehouse turned to the Yellow Pages, and, after following up on a number of leads and referrals, she found her supplier in Montreal.

    The actual design of the hat box was no small challenge either. Working out the dimensions and angles so that the top of the box would fit snugly on the bottom, Stonehouse admitted, was a trail and error process. “My geometry teacher would have been proud.”

The development process also included market research, to ensure the Millinery Vault would be a product of interest to the consumer. Stonehouse did some telephone research on her own, and used information from Statistics Canada to examine the hat market in Canada. She then enlisted help from students of a marketing research program at Algonquin College.

    The students devised a questionnaire and solicited responses at two shopping malls. The students displayed four different designs for hat boxes, including the Millinery Vault, and asked people to comment on their design preference.

    After all that, a production framework was worked out. The plastics supplier in Montreal ships the material to a die cutter, also in Montreal. The cut plastic is then sent to the March of Dimes In Ottawa, where clients of the organization assemble the product as part of a re-habilitation program.

   According to Stonehouse, the process of taking the Millinery Vault from an idea to a product in the marketplace has been “a lot of fun… a lot of headaches too.”

    As president of a fledgling business, Stonehouse’s advice to others contemplating launching a new product, is develop a business plan, and stick to it. After she’s honed her ideas about what the product should be, and had come up with a model of the Vault, she enrolled in a 10 week program at the Youth Enterprise Center, where she learned the steps involved in planning a business. To be successful in running your own business, she believes, also requires perseverance, good market research and listening to what consumers want. It’s also very important to keep an open mind and to be willing to try new approaches.

    Because of costs involved in designing a product and launching a business, and the initial slow period any new product goes through, the amount of promotion of the Millinery Vault Stonehouse has done has been limited. However, the product has been featured in a number of fashion shows, and a Millinery Vault booth was part of the Rideau Township Chamber of Commerce Trade and Consumer Show.

    Stonehouse also had an opportunity to promote her product on a national level when she appeared on an episode of “The New You”.

    Once the Millinery Vault is off the ground, Stonehouse will begin thinking about expansion, possibly by opening her own retail shop. But for now, she’ll continue to concentrate on marketing the Millinery Vault, making more people aware of her new and unique product.

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