Avon Old Farms Students' Nantucket Buckets Fashion Company Takes Off

Avon Old Farms High School alumni Graham Welter, Marc Zuzolo and current student Zach Sweedler started off making some bucket hats featuring the school’s mascot for fellow classmates. Now less than a year later they are selling a variety of bucket hats across the country.

“Kids who weren’t from Avon Old Farms started asking about the hats,” Welter said. “That’s when i thought about it; there are all these plain bucket hats with no designs on them.”

The two, who were co-presidents of the school’s entrepreneur club, started Nantucket Buckets (Welter thought the name was catchy and it stuck) this past Spring. Since then the two have sold more than 1,000 of their hats across the country and recently placed another order for 1,000 more hats that will arrive in the coming weeks.

The bucket hat, long known for its usefulness in keeping precipitation and sun glare out of the wearer’s eyes, could also be a preppy fashion statement.

“We’ve grown a lot we’ve sold most of our hats in person at our school,” Welter said. “But after that we’ve shipped our hats all over the country and we shipped one to China about a month ago.”

Sweedler, Class of 2016, joined the company very shortly after its inception and designed the company website. He also takes product pictures and designs some of the hats.

Zuzolo studies at Miami University in Ohio and Welter now goes to Sacred Heart University. The two graduated from Avon Old Farms this past spring.

Nantucket Buckets is betting on the college, high school and middle school demographic. There are now about 130 campus reps who promote and sell the hats as far away as California.

“We didn’t think it would take off this much as quickly as it did,” Welter said. “We hoped it would get this big, but it’s getting bigger than we thought, faster than we thought it would.”

The company’s goal is to one day be as big as Chubbies, an online company that sells preppy shorts, Welter said.

In the meantime the company is a good source of income for the three members, he said.

Image provided by Nantucket Buckets.

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