‘Survivor Panama’ winner brimming with pride BY KEVIN HERRERA
VENICE It was an exciting moment in Aras Baskauskas’ life when a friend called and excitedly informed him that rapper and songwriter Jay- Z was just spotted wearing a stadium hat during a broadcast of the New Jersey Nets basketball game.
As the owner of the Santa Monica-based company that created the hat adorning Jay-Z’s head, it did-n’t seem like a hard knock life for Baskauskas.
The 25-year-old native Santa Monican launched Tundra Gear in August 2005, introducing a line of traditional Russian winter hats to a target customer base in cold climate states and regions like New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Alaska and even Northern California. Hence the name stadium hat, since the hats are oftentimes sported in outdoor stadiums.
The idea came from a childhood experience when Baskauskas’ father returned home from a trip to Lithuania with 20,000 Russian winter hats that Baskauskas, who was 12 at the time, said were all gray and made from poor quality fabric.
“I thought he was nuts,” Baskauskas said on Thursday.“I said, ‘Dad, what the hell are you doing?’”
Today, his father runs Santa Monica-based Baltic Rim, a business also specializing in Russian winter hats. He is known as one of the first importers of Russian winter hats to the United States.
The younger Baskauskas, now a resident of Venice, felt he could sell more of the same type of hat if he spruced the product up a bit by offering it in different colors and adding sports logos. He made the idea his topic for a master’s thesis at the University of California Irvine, where Baskauskas played NCAA men’s basketball as point guard.
“Instead of wearing baseball hats, these hats are really warm and comfortable too,” he said.
The idea stayed there on paper until a year later, during a five-month stay in Capetown, South Africa, where he went to open a non-profit yoga studio and spent his nights dreaming about starting a hat company.
Upon his return home in June of 2005, Baskauskas got a job as a yoga instructor at Shakti’s Elements on Broadway and borrowed $10,000 from his mother and decided to try his hand at entrepreneurship.
But he needed something to help him sustain a new business.
The CBS reality series “Survivor” came knocking on the door a few months after Baskauskas returned from Capetown, and he was selected as one of 16 contestants to battle for a $1 million prize on season 12 — “Survivor Panama: Exile Island.”
Baskauskas spent 39 days on the island, eating bugs that he said had a “gooey and sour taste.”
But it all paid off in the end as Baskauskas was crowned the “Survivor” winner and was awarded $1 million, $100,000 of which he immediately donated to charities.
The five months from when producers finished filming the second-to-the-last episode and when the winner was announced were brutal for Baskauskas, who knew deep down that his peers would vote him as the champion.
“I couldn’t share my joy with anyone,” he said.“I had this unbelievable high that I just won a million dollars, but I couldn’t tell anyone.”
Since his character was considered to be “vanilla” on the show, a plain person who brought very little drama to the cast, Baskauskas is rarely identified by fans on the street, he said.
During the week when Baskauskas was announced as the winner, his Web site, Tundragear.com, received 400,000 hits.
The $30 hats have been a hit with sports fans in other parts of the country. The hats can be purchased with $5 detachable pins that represent several NFL, NHL and college teams. No local college team, not even UCI, is offered. All pins are licensed.
Baskauskas couldn’t see a reason for fans to wear the stadium hat in Southern California, a region that stays mild to warm year round, “versus someone who would wear it in Ann Arbor.”
“It was never my goal to sell in California,” said Baskauskas. “We have the Internet now and if we do a good Internet marketing campaign, we can sell the hats anywhere.”
The product has also proven a favorite among celebrities, seen on the heads of Elijah Wood, the Olsen Twins, LeAnn Rimes, Jack Osbourne and Macy Gray, who wears a stadium hat with the Dallas Cowboys pin.
The majority of his pins have been sold to Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers and Penn State Nittany Lions fans.
It’s not Baskauskas’ dream for his business to last forever, but he would like to see the hat become a staple in American culture, much like the baseball hat, within a decade. Rather, he would like to spend more time with the Cheshire Project, a creative camp for the mentally challenged in Venice.
“I would like to be able to leave Tundra Gear with enough money to keep supporting the ventures that are dear to my heart, like yoga and working with people who are less fortunate,” he said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 15, 2007. Read the original PDF.