Fashion month here at Friends of the Fountain means we are shining the light on the people, brands, and ideas that are doing something worth talking about.

It’s always great to promote your friends, especially when they are doing cool things. This week we’re speaking with a brand that started in Kelowna, built by people we have known for years, that has quietly grown into something a lot bigger than a hat company.

Friends of Felix is one of those rare things where the product is great and the mission behind it is even better. We have been watching Austin and Mahlon build this from the early days and it has been genuinely exciting to see where it has gone.

Special thanks to Austin Penrose for his time and all his meaningful work.

We hope this newsletter resonates with you and that you share it with anyone in your world who might need to hear it. Forward this newsletter to a friend, send the link, or just mention the brand next time the conversation calls for it. That is exactly the kind of thing Friends of Felix was built on, and it is exactly what Friends of the Fountain is about too.

⏳️ Estimated Read Time: 7 minutes

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Founder Spotlight

re are brands that sell you something, and then there are brands that mean something. Friends of Felix sits firmly in the second camp.

Started about three years ago out of Kelowna, B.C., FofF makes clean, well-constructed five-panel hats and apparel with a quiet but deliberate mission: to get people, and men in particular, talking about their mental health.

Not in a heavy-handed way. Not with clinical language or crisis hotlines printed on the tag. Just a hat with an honest message, worn by someone who means it, sparking a conversation that might not have happened otherwise.

We sat down with co-founder Austin Penrose, a longtime friend around the Fountain, to talk about how the brand started, what they've learned building it, and why sometimes the most powerful thing you can do for someone is just listen.

The original name for FofF was Happy Dude, which lasted all of a few months before a copyright issue in Ontario brought things to a hard stop. The domain, the name, the whole thing, someone was sitting on it and wanted a significant sum to let it go, to the tune of a million bucks. Rather than pay up, Austin and co-founder Mahlon pivoted.

The name Felix came out of that process. It means happy, joyous, lucky, and fortunate across a range of languages and references, which made it a natural heir to the Happy Dude spirit.

More than that, it gave the brand a kind of persona, a character that could carry the message. Felix is not a real person. He is more of a daily reminder. A nudge toward gratitude and presence built right into the name of the thing you are wearing.

"We paid a little homage to Happy Dude with Friends of Felix,"

Austin explained. "But Felix is more of that happiness reminder. Life is fortunate. Life is precious."

Neither Austin nor Mahlon came from mental health backgrounds. What they did have was lived experience, watching friends, family, and themselves navigate difficult seasons without always having the language or the space to talk about it. That became the core of what Friends of Felix is trying to do.

"Any big step within mental health usually starts with those little tiny conversations, whether it's family, friends, or even strangers."

The hats are a subtle (and stylish) gateway to those conversations.

Phrases like

are designed to make people pause.

When someone spots the hat and asks about it, the person wearing it gets a natural opening to explain what the brand is about and why it resonates with them. That is not an accident. It is the whole strategy.

Alongside the many conversations it supports, the hats also signal solidarity and care for a topic that can tell the people in the room that you care without being overt.

Three years in, with Friends of Felix growing steadily and the product reaching people well beyond Kelowna, Austin has picked up a few things worth passing along to anyone thinking about launching their own brand, especially in fashion.

The biggest one is deceptively simple: just start.

Stop optimizing the plan and start gathering real feedback. Friends of Felix launched with small order volumes and low minimums on purpose. They wanted to find out what actually moved before making bigger bets. Some designs they expected to do well on ads did nothing. You cannot know until you try.

"You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to tweak what already works and have a strong message behind it."

Another jewel he shared was to be careful not to overcomplicate things.

His example: the team developed a custom sizing system for their unstructured hats, offering both a high profile and a low profile version so customers could get the fit they wanted. It seemed like a thoughtful solution to real feedback they had received.

In practice, it created more confusion than it solved. Customer service questions piled up. And in the end, most customers just did not care enough about the distinction for it to be worth the complexity.

Five-panel hats are not a new product. But Friends of Felix worked on the silhouette, dialling in the proportions so the hat actually sits on your head rather than riding high, and put a mission behind it that nobody else had. That is enough.

Some of the best brand moments at Friends of Felix have arrived without any engineering.

Through a chain of mutual connections and a shared appreciation for what the brand stands for, Jelly Roll - a massive star - ended up wearing one of their caps, along with members of his crew. Nobody paid for that placement. It happened because the product and the message resonated with people who happened to know people.

Canadian artist Cam Whitcomb has also been spotted in their gear. Again, organic. That kind of reach is hard to plan for, but it tends to follow brands that are genuinely saying something rather than just selling something.

The audience itself reflects this. Despite the focus on men's mental health, the brand's Instagram sits at roughly 52% male and 48% female. A significant portion of purchases from women are gifts for partners, fathers, uncles, and brothers (and women also love to wear them). The message travels across those relationships in both directions, something we dealt with in the early days of SAXX as well.

Mission over product

Standing out in a crowded market

Building and testing

Shop Friends of Felix

This is a non-paid recommendation to pick up a FofF hat for yourself - hats are $40 CAD and ship across Canada and the US. The team runs occasional BOGO deals and bundle pricing, so signing up for the mailing list at friendsoffelix.com is worth it.

If you are in Kelowna, you can also stop by the warehouse directly for local pickup and a look at the full range in person.

Follow along and reach out: friendsoffelix.com

Friends of the Fountain is about putting good people in the room together.
Austin and the Friends of Felix crew are exactly that kind of people.

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