Stormy Kromer and Their Love of Plaid

Hi everybody! I have the pleasure, each and every day, of going to work at a great American company: Stormy Kromer. Stormy Kromer is a company near and dear to my heart, not only because my father rescued it from extinction about 10 years ago, but also because as a kid in the U.P., I wore a black Kromer cap all winter long.

I work on a lot of things here – sales, marketing, social media, new product development – but one of the most interesting things I get to do is design plaids.

Yes, that’s right. I get to dream up new, fashionable plaid designs each year for our new product launch. How lucky can a girl get?

Stormy Kromer may be best known for our iconic red and black plaid – a slight variation of the traditional buffalo plaid that has represented the American outdoors for so long. But we’ve introduced several popular new plaids in the past few years: Mapleberry, Silver Stone, Sequoia and Chestnut, just to name a few. All of these are exclusive designs.

If you look at any plaid in your closet (and since you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve got a few to choose from), you’ll notice it’s essentially a repeat of colors going across the shirt one way, and then that repeat is turned 90 degrees and put on top.

Here is the “one-way” repeat of our Sequoia Plaid:

Turn it 90 degrees:

And with the help of Photoshop, lay them on top of each other to get this:

This handsome plaid is new for this year in our Deck Shirt style.

That’s it. Essentially you let your imagination go wild and see what you come up with. This design actually uses a burnt orange background with dark green, beige, bright green and burgundy. Not necessarily a group of colors you would put together right off the bat, but when you get just the right balance of the colors and the weights of the lines, magic can happen.

If you’re interested in trying your hand at designing yourself, and you’ve got a little skill with Photoshop, check out this great blog post that provides instructions and an easy-to-use plaid template.

If you’ve got any great suggestions for new plaid designs that Stormy Kromer should consider, I’d love to hear them. You can reach me at gthorsen@stormykromer.com. And remember one of our favorite mottos here at Stormy Kromer:

“If you can’t figure out which color to wear, choose plaid.”