Papa Nui on Growth, Creative Evolution and Staying Authentic

• Interviews
• By Those That Know
• 3rd August 2025
• 12 min read

Papa Nui began with $345 from a shop bonus. More than a decade later, after over 100 cap models and an expanding collection of shirts, patches, trunks and jackets, John Tesoriero still marvels at how far that modest sum has travelled.

Those That Know has been part of the journey since 2019, when Papa Nui became the first brand we sold. We did not yet have a fully formed plan for the store; we simply knew that the caps were exceptional and that Tesoriero’s approach to product and storytelling felt closely aligned with our own. Our first interview with him was one of the earliest articles published in this journal.

Six years on, the scale of Papa Nui may have changed, but its purpose has not. Tesoriero is still trying to make the best headwear possible. What has sharpened is his understanding of what that means. The phrase he now returns to is simple: “No Cap Tougher.”

“Continually being focused on the minutiae and tackling the smallest improvements is the very thing that allows Papa Nui caps to stand above the rest,” he says. “If that’s a philosophy, then that’s what I do best.”

Tesoriero still works in periods of what he calls “binge designing”. Once a line of thought takes hold, he follows it until it has been exhausted. “It’s almost like a creative fever,” he says. “Once it starts, I have to see it through to completion or I lose momentum entirely.”

The resulting backlog of samples is not merely creative excess; it is a practical response to manufacturing in Japan. Factories work with remarkable precision but within strict production windows. When one becomes available, Papa Nui may have only seven to ten days to coordinate retailer numbers and place an order. A collection of completed samples gives Tesoriero what he describes as a “creative arsenal”: he can choose the product best suited to the direction of the brand and make an immediate decision.

Most of those samples eventually reach the market. When one does not, it is usually because the fabric failed to suit the style or the factory could not resolve the fit after several attempts. Even then, the work is rarely wasted. Mistakes expose a new route through an idea, and some of Papa Nui’s strongest caps have emerged from correcting an earlier failure.

His wife is often the person who reminds him that invention need not mean abandoning what already works. As new customers discover older Papa Nui posts, while long-standing customers look to replace caps they have worn for four or five years, demand has grown for the brand’s established designs. Tesoriero has therefore begun balancing seasonal ideas with more regular returns of what he calls “Papa’s icon classics”, including the first-edition A-3, Tail End Charlie and Hell Cat.

Failure has never been an abstract concept for Tesoriero. More than 40 years in the clothing industry exposed him to companies that did not work, bosses who dismissed ideas and workplaces where he felt he had no voice. Those experiences strengthened his determination to build something independently, without compromising his vision to serve somebody else’s ego.

He is equally realistic about the limits of his own audience. Papa Nui draws on an unusually deep visual vocabulary: wartime issues of National Geographic, decades of magazines, and vintage shops visited around the world since he was 20. Not everyone arrives with the same references or the confidence to wear an unfamiliar shape. Part of his job is to bring people into that world through the product and its story.

“People are more conventional than you think and find comfort in something as familiar as a baseball cap,” he says. “When you start challenging the conventional shapes, you begin to talk to a more confident and knowledgeable customer.” The loss of the many activity-specific caps and hats once found in menswear, together with their replacement by a generic baseball cap carrying a different logo, is precisely the homogenisation Papa Nui exists to resist.

Some ideas simply need time to find their audience. Tesoriero remembers the Waikiki as a particularly evocative cap, built around images of the Beach Boys gathered outside Honolulu’s Moana Hotel. At Those That Know it became a favourite, but it was initially a slow burner elsewhere. The romance that seemed immediate to its designer took longer for other people to see.

The Pilar demanded an even greater act of faith. Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s long-billed fishing cap, its specification travelled twice around the world before a Japanese factory agreed to make it, and then only if Tesoriero supplied the patent-leather visor himself. It would have been easy to place Hemingway’s name on a generic product, as many others had done. Tesoriero wanted to reconstruct the real thing.

The finished cap used the original crown shape and visor, while an internal label reproduced the typeface painted on the stern of Hemingway’s boat in the 1930s. Tesoriero added Papa Nui’s military perspective, drawing on the writer’s wartime patrols aboard Pilar. It was bold, costly and difficult to manufacture. His friend Brian Robinson of C. Woodcock & Co sold large numbers to an established outdoors audience in the United States, but Tesoriero took longer to clear his own stock.

For him, the result was still worthwhile. Hemingway’s unpretentious, rugged and highly personal way of dressing had fascinated him for years. Contemporary “Hemingway caps” rarely matched the archival photographs used to sell them; the connection was often no more than a name. The Pilar was an attempt to take the details seriously.

“There are products that you do that are not about making money,” Tesoriero says. “To me, it’s about seeing an idea realised. Some things are so cool, yet so left of field, that you just have to make them happen. If the right people understand, then your goal is complete.”

Timing can be as important as the idea itself. Early in the brand’s life, Tesoriero recognised that Frog Skin camouflage could move beyond the re-enactment market and into clothing for the street. The pattern became central to Papa Nui through products such as the Beach Battalion Hat and Corsairs Cap. It is now widely used, but he believes the connection with Papa Nui remains unmistakable.

He was less fortunate with 1940s-length shorts. A favourite pair belonging to his father, essentially swimming trunks from around 1949, provided the proportions for an olive-drab herringbone-twill design. Retailers considered them too short, leaving Tesoriero unable to meet factory minimums. When similarly brief UDT-style trunks later appeared everywhere, he felt he had missed the moment. A slightly longer version released for summer 2025 sold through in about 12 days.

Historical accuracy, for Tesoriero, does not mean producing a fragile facsimile. His A-3 Mechanics Cap begins with a design issued in the millions during the Second World War and therefore made cheaply and quickly. Papa Nui retains the original pattern while increasing the substance of the entire construction. “It’s about taking something that was functional but disposable and making it heirloom quality,” he says.

Papa Nui has never presented itself as a reproduction brand. Tesoriero’s interest lies in enhancing the original: respecting its visual language while using better materials and manufacturing to create something suited to the present. Ethical production is inseparable from that quality. His work in Japan with John Lofgren and Bryan Shettig of The Rite Stuff is built around that shared commitment.

When production takes place elsewhere, Tesoriero looks for individual makers rather than anonymous factories. That approach has created long-standing relationships in Australia, Thailand and Vietnam. “Soul comes from a maker and not a location,” he says. “It’s about finding people who care about their craft, regardless of where they happen to be working.”

The references behind the work once lived in paste-up books. During the late 1980s and early ’90s, Tesoriero used office colour copiers to reproduce images and assemble visual albums. Now much of the archive lives in his memory. Wartime issues of National Geographic remain particularly valuable because they document how everyday clothing was actually worn, decade by decade. Years of studying collectors’ books and filling suitcases with 1940s plaid shirts, fly-fishing vests and canvas hunting coats have given him an internal catalogue to revisit whenever an idea begins to form.

The difference between a Papa Nui cap from 2019 and one made six years later is often invisible. Tesoriero may spend hours adjusting a seam by half a centimetre or questioning the way a crown pinches when worn. Inside the cap, seams hidden by the sweatband are taped, finished and kept tidy. Army Duck visor linings are designed to remain flexible, natural and shapeable, particularly beneath a fully stitched visor. These are not details intended to announce themselves from across a room; they reveal themselves when the cap is handled.

The deepest influence on Papa Nui is more personal. Tesoriero’s father was, in his words, “a beautiful human being” and a renaissance man committed to learning, self-improvement and his community. His sons heard the horror stories of his wartime experience, but those were never what he chose to emphasise. He remembered his friends, the larrikin behaviour, the humour and the bonds formed under impossible circumstances. He marched on Anzac Day until he could no longer complete the city circuit and was still telling stories from his hospital bed.

He also understood the creative process. The early direction of Papa Nui drew loosely on his adventures and on the stories that had shaped his son’s imagination. “He did provide the impetus at that moment when I was trying to figure out my direction,” Tesoriero says. “The only consistent thing I could think of was his war stories and how that had been the major influence in anything I did. It gave me that anchor point, that authentic foundation to build from.”

That creativity now continues through another generation. Both of Tesoriero’s children work in creative fields, and he recognises in them the same process his father once recognised in him.

John Lofgren has remained true to the handshake agreement that established Papa Nui’s production in Japan. Over time, Lofgren, Tesoriero and Shettig have developed what Tesoriero describes as a triptych of makers: distinct brands sharing manufacturing knowledge and supporting one another’s work. A joint pop-up at Lofgren’s Speedway store in Sendai in April 2025 gave Tesoriero his first opportunity to meet many of his Japanese customers.

Collaboration also lets Papa Nui enter categories that interest Tesoriero but sit outside his main focus, often in quantities too small for a Japanese factory. Larger projects with Filson and Alpha can rely on substantial orders; smaller independent partnerships offer a different kind of creative freedom. East Asia Supply Co creates room to explore Vietnam-era products in limited runs, while Surfa Sam returned Tesoriero to his own history in Australian skateboarding.

The Rite Stuff is a particularly natural partner: two specialists agree on a theme, then each applies his own expertise. Their 2025 work looked to early nautical denim and the Moku craze of 1930s Honolulu. “When you’re working with people who understand your aesthetic, everything just flows naturally,” Tesoriero says.

For a collaboration to work, Tesoriero must respect what the other person is doing and see an expertise that complements his own. Papa Nui remains a one-person operation, from the most creative decisions to the most manual tasks, and partnerships that demand layers of corporate paperwork quickly lose their appeal. Shared enthusiasm matters more than scale.

The brand’s identity is sufficiently strong to survive that exchange. Its clothing is shaped by life in the antipodes, where a temperature of 85 degrees and 90 per cent humidity makes much conventional heritage dressing absurd. Tesoriero looks for collaborators who understand that climate and can find common ground in a military, utility or outdoor story. Working with a large corporation can be challenging, but a compelling historical premise, such as the Alaska Scouts behind his Filson project, gives the product a reason to exist.

The same preference for direct, human production led to Papa Nui’s patches. Seeking the character of Vietnam War-era examples, Tesoriero found a family-run workshop in Ho Chi Minh City still using hand-operated machinery. The technology is old, the quantities are manageable and the money paid for the work directly supports the makers.

“New isn’t always better,” he says. “If you want something that feels right, you have to go to the source.”

Tesoriero believes Papa Nui can grow without losing its personality, provided the product retains its integrity. The customer base is now large enough to support ideas even when retailers hesitate, giving him a degree of independence that did not exist in the early years. The harder task is finding new stockists willing to champion something unfamiliar rather than carrying the same established Japanese labels as every other store.

His immediate ambition at the time of this interview was straightforward: leave his day job, give Papa Nui his complete attention and allow the brand to pay a salary and the household bills. A larger presence in Europe and a breakthrough in Japan remain important goals, but scale is not an end in itself. Retailers have to do more than place an order; the best of them tell the story and explain why the product is different.

Inspiration is the one resource he does not expect to exhaust. A lifetime of references gives Papa Nui room to move through military clothing, utility garments and the outdoors without leaving its central identity behind.

“I can’t see that Papa will be going away any time soon,” Tesoriero says. “The well of inspiration runs deep when you’ve been collecting references for decades.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Papa Nui Cap Co at Those That Know

Explore our current selection on the Papa Nui Cap Co brand page.

More interviews from the journal

• Jonathan Lukacek and The Bandanna Almanac
• John Tesoriero and Papa Nui in 2019
• Bryan Shettig and The Rite Stuff
• Yuki Nagaoka and Milestone Basement
• Ryota Yamasaki and Loop & Weft