Frisco – In the not so far reaches of Frisco, you’ll find a quiet street in your typical North Texas neighborhood. At one of those homes, Elizabeth Brady quietly works away at her art, while dodging smoke from her searing sketching. “I’ve always been artsy, I mean, but I have drawn and done a few things like that, but not at this level,” said Elizabeth.
Elizabeth owns the Burned Hat Co., a business she started in 2023 after discovering she had a knack for burning designs into the brims of colorful cowboy hats. “I love putting the tool to the hat and watching it burn and making the design in the hat is so gratifying to me,” said Elizabeth.
Elizabeth moved to Texas in 1989 and had a career in cosmetics when one day, everything changed. “So two and a half years ago, I was in a car accident,” said Elizabeth. “I had a young girl, 16 years old and had her driver’s license for two weeks, and she was busy on her phone and she hit me at about 45 miles an hour when I was almost at a stop in my car. Resulted in numerous herniated vertebrae and broken ribs and concussion that lasted for over seven months and still to this day still have concussion issues. If you have a concussion, anybody will tell you sound, lights, certain things just don’t do good when you’re around it. And so one of the things that the neurologist recommended was trying to find something I could kind of focus on, and that’s how Burned Hat Co. started. I started burning the hats, and I just never stopped.”
Carefully creating her designs, Elizabeth hand draws everything on her hats. “I don’t trace,” explained Elizabeth. “I just sit down with a hat and whatever comes out, comes out. I don’t really think about it. So sometimes you’ll see the same kind of design, but it’ll be a little bit different because I normally never do two hats the same.”…