Brad Pullum has had plenty of ideas for inventions over the years, but you really need to know about this one…so hold on to your hats.

Pullum, a native of Athens, has worn a cowboy hat his whole life. And whenever he drove, he had to remove his hat—he’s six-feet-seven—and lay it on the dashboard. Which was fine, so long as he never made a turn, or went around a curve,or accelerated, or went over a bump or a railroad track. But if he did any of the above, his hat would slide across the dash, sometimes onto the floor or into his passenger’s lap.

"Everybody I knew had the same problem," Pullum says. (Even those who weren’t six-seven.) "Everybody put their hat on the dash, so they could easily reach it—it’s not a good idea to put it on the seat, to get smashed—but nobody could figure out a way to keep it from sliding.

"And it’s frustrating for a wife or girlfriend to always have to be the official hat catcher."

He also found that whenever he had his dashboard cleaned, if he didn’t wipe off a place before he set down his hat, the hat would get stained. A little over a year ago, Pullum, fed up, went looking for a solution. After much searching, he found a grand total of one hat holder on the market, and this one was hardly satisfactory—it was a wire product that had to be mounted with screws, it was spring-loaded, and, worst of all, instead of preserving the hat it mashed it against the ceiling or window.

"Nobody liked it, but everybody used it because it was the only thing out there," he says.

So Pullum, who’s always been the entrepreneurial sort, took off his cowboy hat and put on his thinking cap. He got some components together, built a prototype hat holder in his garage, used it himself for a day with fabulous success, and then carried it to show to his longtime friend, Limestone County Sheriff Mike Blakely. He asked Blakely to try it himself. He did, and pronounced it a winner.

"He couldn’t make the hat move," Pullum says. "I figured if it would work for him and his type of driving, it’d work for anybody." Blakely wanted one for all his deputies, and Pullum, with one satisfied customer under his hat, went back to his garage and turned out about 200 more prototypes. He got a patent attorney, but he wasn’t quite happy with his original name, the Mushroom Hat Holder—too psychedelic?--so he and Blakely put their heads together and came up with the name Hat Buddy. And he started putting together the pieces for a full-blown manufacturing process. Getting all the pieces in place was the work of a full year—not something Pullum just pulled out of his hat.

Last summer, Pullum paid a call to Marchel Hice, owner of Hice Sewing, who told him that he was about to lay off his last two employees, and would, in short, be thrilled to have something else to make. (They specialized in medical uniforms.) And Pullum was thrilled at the prospect of being hands-on with the production.

Pullum then began calling on potential customers, traveling to western stores across the country, and his efforts rapidly mushroomed, so to speak. Cavender’s Boot City, a chain out of Texas, was his first corporate account, and Pullum gives a tip of his hat to, among others, Al Luiz, the president of Hatco in Garland, Texas, for not only ordering from him but prodding him to get to market with his invention.

"A lot of things have encouraged me," Pullum says. "We’re in full production now (the plant can turn out 300 Hat Buddies a day), and we’re all over the country with distributors and sales reps. We’re in every U. S. state."

The Hat Buddy (you can see a full demonstration video at HatBuddy.com) is a mobile hat holder (suitable for any kind of hat) that stays firmly in place on any horizontal surface, by means of a polyurethane gel pad that does not leave a residue or film. As rough-riding Sheriff Blakely will attest, "My Hat Buddy keeps my hat in good shape and keeps it right where I put it."

And frustrated hat wearers can now thank Brad Pullum, who took the bull by the horns and refused to keep a good idea under his hat.

For more information on the Hat Buddy, visit www.HatBuddy.com, or call Brad Pullum at 256-777-7193; email him at brad@hatbuddy.com.