How The Hat He Once Used to Hide Behind Became The Cornerstone of His Calling: Derek Welborn of Saints Western

There is a version of the Saints Western story that sounds almost too good to be true.

An Austin based pastor starts making hats at home. He uses nearly all of his vacation time to try selling them at Round Top. A veteran vendor sees something in him and buys him thousands of dollars in equipment.

Just a short time later, Brandon Lake calls and asks to become his business partner. Soon Derek Welborn is on tour, then sitting in a Nashville house making hats for some of the biggest names in music.

It is an incredible story, but it's also not where his story begins, or even why we wanted to highlight Saints Western. It's a story of grit, loss, and determination.

Derek Welborn was in his thirties when his hair started to fall out, and a hat he did not wear to stand out.

He wore it to hide.

In 2020, Welborn developed alopecia areata, an autoimmune condition that causes the body to attack its own hair follicles.

“There was no gradual adjustment,” he remembers. “One day I had hair, and the next day it’s out.” It was falling out clumps.

One bald spot appeared. Then another. Soon, he says, it felt as though the hair loss was taking over his head.

“It was a really hard thing to navigate with my identity.” So, he covered it. First with baseball caps. Then with a Stetson.

For nearly a year, Derek says he would not leave the house without a hat.

And somewhere in that season came a prayer that, looking back, feels like the real beginning of Saints Western. Derek said throughout this chapter of life, he continually prayed,

Long before he was making hats, Derek was already an unlikely mix of athlete and artist.

Growing up, baseball was the plan. He played through high school and into college.

However, he was also the kid who laid his clothes out on the floor the night before school. He painted. He noticed what people wore on television and tried to find his own version.

“I always had that creative bent,” he says. “I just never really explored it, until recent years.”

Welborn played baseball at South Georgia College, then transferred to Lee University where he majored in physical education, and graduated in December, so there weren't a ton of teaching jobs. He had a variety of roles from subbing to long term subbing. Then, his life eventually moved in another direction: ministry.

Derek began serving young people in a juvenile detention center, then spent years as a youth pastor in South Georgia then in North Georgia before moving to Austin to work as youth pastor then becoming a campus pastor in downtown Austin.

He loved the work, but he also learned how heavy it can be to carry other people’s burdens while trying to manage your own.

“You’re bearing the weight of other people’s burdens while trying to manage your own stuff and your own family.”

At one point, while counseling others, Derek realized he needed counseling too to help bear the weight of it all, yet in the same breath remarked how how much of a joy it all was, watching lives transform over the years.

There is an important thread running through his story: he does not talk about difficult seasons as though faith made them easy, it was the vehicle that helped power him through each season.

After a year of wearing hats because of his hair loss, Derek started looking at custom hats online. He loved them, but he did not love the price.

“So I was buying cheap hats and trying to make them look cool.”

Eventually curiosity won, recalling as he was looking them up he thought,

“I wonder if I can learn how to make these.”

Since he had been following so many hatmakers online, social media began serving him ads for raw materials. Around Father’s Day, Derek asked his wife, Jill, if he could order enough supplies to try making one himself.

He bought a hat block on eBay, but it was not even the right kind. It was a fedora hat block. 

So he taped a hat stretcher to the bottom of it to get the crown depth he needed, used a clothes steamer and figured the rest out as he went.

“I was honestly shocked because I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

Birthday gifts became felt, and he made another hat, then another. Conveniently, he and Jill had the same head size, so she started wearing them too.

People noticed. They would compliment Jill on her hat.

“Oh, he made it,” she would tell them.

And eventually came the obvious question: You make hats?

Derek would joke,

“Well, I make me hats.”

He only had one size block, and the wrong type of hat block at that.

One of the most moving parts of Saints Western’s story is how often someone else recognized the possibility before Derek could fully see it himself. A man at his church learned Derek was making hats and offered to buy him a complete set of hat blocks.

Derek resisted. The man in his congregation insisted telling him,

“Paul was a tentmaker. You’re a hatmaker. I want to bless you. Don’t take this from me.” Derek finally said yes to the unexpected blessing.

Then came Clint Hough. A mutual friend, songwriter Jesse Reeves, thought the introduction made sense, since Clint was a longtime Round Top vendor with decades of experience importing goods from Mexico and knowledge of the hat business, even working with Cavender's at one point. Maybe he could help Derek with materials or just someone to chat about the business?

Derek and Clint went to lunch. Four hours later, they were still talking. Eventually Clint started telling Derek about Round Top.

“Why don’t you come and sell your hats in my booth?”

There was one fairly significant logistical issue: Derek was still a full-time pastor. So he asked for two weeks off, using essentially all of his PTO to see what might happen.

His previous experience with Round Top had been brief. He and Jill had visited once with two small children on a cold day, and the kids did not want to wear their jackets. It was a short trip to say the least.

He had heard of Round Top too, of course. He just had no idea what he was walking into...

Derek set up in the corner of Clint’s booth and started selling. He sold around 12 hats.

Not enough to quit his job, but enough to realize, there was a place for Saints in Round Top. 

After the show, Clint told Derek, “If you want to do this, I would love to help you and your wife.”

Then Clint asked what Derek needed.

Derek gave him a list.

Clint bought roughly $15,000 worth of hat making equipment.

Not as a loan, as a gift.

Later, Clint took Derek to León, Mexico, where they found a century-old factory and began developing boots.

For several Round Top shows, at The Arbors, he worked alongside Derek, helping carry the risk and teaching him the rhythms of the show.

Then eventually, he handed it over.

The message was essentially:

I taught you Round Top. You’ve got it from here.

Round Top gave Derek a place where the two sides of his life overlapped in a significant way it intertwined his creative side along with his love for people.

“What I love about that retail space is that it allows me the freedom to create, and then the pastoral side of me with people and just meeting people, hearing their stories. It kind of merged the two.”

Years earlier, Derek had loved that his downtown Austin church met inside a bar because it provided common ground for people who might never feel comfortable walking into a traditional church.

There is a similar instinct behind the way he approaches Saints: create something, welcome people in, and hear their stories.

When Derek first started making hats, there was one person he dreamed of making one for: Brandon Lake.

Lake had become one of the biggest artists in Christian music and, importantly to a new hat maker with a dream, he wore hats.

“Man, it would be cool to make him a hat one day.”

Through mutual friends and Nashville connections, one of Derek’s hats eventually made its way into Brandon’s world.

Then one Saturday morning, Derek’s friend David Leonard FaceTimed him around 8 a.m.

“Dude, sit down.”

David had been hanging out with Brandon the night before.

Brandon wanted a hat.

Derek could hardly believe it.

“Bro, that was my goal.”

David’s response would stick.

“Well, you better dream bigger because God did that, you know, in a few months.”

Derek made the hat, and he and Brandon stayed in touch. They discovered they shared a love of fashion, style, creativity and dreaming up what might come next.

Their friendship developed for roughly a year and a half before they even met in person. Eventually they did, when Brandon came through Austin for a show.

Afterward, Brandon looked around at the collection of creative people gathered there and said something Derek remembers clearly.

“I don’t know what God’s doing, but He’s doing something with this crew right here.”

Later, during a Round Top show, Brandon called. He had always wanted to build a brand but did not have the bandwidth to do it alone.

“What if I came on as a partner, and we do this together.”

The phone call opened another series of doors.

Derek brought in Austin entrepreneur Wade Lombard for business guidance and Ryan Case, who had years of fashion-industry experience. With partners and investment behind the company, Derek finally had the opportunity to step away from full-time ministry and give Saints Western a real shot.

While Derek was still pastoring, he had another idea: mobile retail. Maybe he could renovate an Airstream, hire someone to travel with it and take Saints to events without leaving ministry. 

He started looking. At Round Top, he asked around the Arbors to see if anyone knew of one for sale. Then one day, while walking through the show, a woman called out to him.

 “Hey, preacher, I got an Airstream.” 

Derek went to look, and eventually bought it. Later, as Saints’ partnership with Brandon was taking shape, Brandon had an idea of his own. The Airstream was being renovated, and he had a tour coming. “Bro, you got this Airstream. Let’s take it on tour."

Suddenly Derek had about three months to finish the renovation, build inventory and prepare Saints Western to travel alongside the tour. From the outside, going on tour with Brandon Lake sounds glamorous. Derek’s version involved selling before and after the shows, packing everything up around one in the morning, driving four or five hours to the next city and sleeping at rest stops. He and Ryan eventually completed around 25 tour dates. During one especially brutal stretch, Derek estimates they slept eight hours over four days. The reality of building a business and a dream requires a whole lot of grit. The high of seeing dreams realized and the grit to keep going. 
“It was not probably the safest thing in the sense of like, we were exhausted," Derek recalls of the tour days, but also reminices how there is nothing like it.

Eventually they brought in additional help. City by city, more people were discovering Saints Western. Then came Nashville.

In December, Brandon called again. He was putting together a songwriting retreat and wanted Derek to come make hats. What started as a relatively small gathering grew. Derek brought his equipment and set up in the center of the house, while songwriters worked in rooms to his left, upstairs and downstairs.

Every day new artists came through: Lainey Wilson, Thomas Rhett, Russell Dickerson, HARDY, Nick Jonas and many more of Nashville’s artists and songwriters.

Derek would start making hats around 9 a.m. and sometimes work until one or two in the morning. In one week, he made around 21 hats.

The writers made 47 songs.

He could hear the music being created around him while he worked.

“What am I doing here? This is crazy.”

Ask Derek what he wants someone to feel when they put on a Saints hat and the story circles back.

“I wore hats because I was trying to hide.”

Today, his goal is almost the opposite.

“What story do you want to tell?”

Derek makes stock hats, ready-to-wear pieces and fully custom hats, but the transaction is not the part he seems most interested in.

What matters more is the person sitting across from him.

“I want to help tell their story.”

And ultimately:

“I hope that they feel like number one valued as a person. And then number two that their story’s being told.”

Walk into Saints Western during Round Top and Derek wants you to feel all of it.

“I want people when they come into our booth. I want them to feel all five senses, like from the smell to what they touch and all the things because it creates memories.”

The furniture, the clothes, boots, hats, vintage pieces and art are all layered together.

“I try to make it feel like home for people.”

What shoppers do not necessarily see is what came before the finished booth: Derek moving couches himself, setup and teardown, long days, his kids brushing hats, Jill stepping in wherever she is needed and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day for two weeks.

“It’s the grittiness of it.”

That part of Round Top rarely makes the polished photo, but it is often what makes the finished booth possible.

Derek is the dreamer. Jill, he says, is the practical one. The perfect pair! “She basically works for Saints for free.”

She has been beside him through the mountaintops and valleys of building the business, while also helping Derek recognize when trying to carry everything himself is no longer sustainable.

“I couldn’t do this without her.”

Then, there are the other vendors. “Everybody’s out there just grinding.” Derek talks about the community around him at the Arbors, including Curtis Ann, the Arbors founder, as one of the things he has come to love about Round Top.

“It’s not a competition to us. It’s more like, hey, all ships rise when we celebrate and help one another.”

The story of Saints Western isn't really just about hats. It's about the seasons we want to hide from are inevitably shaping us for the next. For Derek his love for people, sharing his faith in Jesus, and creativity now merged in to a new chapter, or you might say, his calling.

“Well, you better dream bigger because God did that, you know, in a few months.”

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