No one would mistake Erik Stuebe and Françoise Séjourné for alter egos. "I'm linear and logical," says Stuebe, 31. "Françoise is oriented to design. If she were going to the woods, she'd take a sketch pad, not food." As business partners, though, the duo make a perfect fit. Creators of Blue Marlin vintage baseball caps, they have given historic styles a new twist. Emblazoned with logos from baseball's Negro Leagues (Latin League logos were added in '97), the brushed cotton twill toppings are the hats of choice for many Hollywood headliners. Cindy Crawford wears them, and Bruce Willis snagged all the "B"-logo caps (for the Birmingham Black Barons and the Brooklyn Royal Giants) at a Los Angeles boutique. "Everybody loves to hide their head in that hat," says Alan Baron, owner of Malibu's Planet Blue specialty shop. "Once you buy one, you come back for more."
Ironically, neither Harvard MBA Stuebe, the bachelor son of a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and his German wife, nor Séjourné, 33, a sportswear designer of Haitian descent who married computer analyst Ed Rigaud last year, was all that big on baseball. But while brainstorming about starting a business together, the then-Palo Alto, Calif., neighbors decided that rethinking the baseball cap would be a home run. "The predominant hats are very boxy and stiff," says Stuebe. "We wanted ours to be soft and floppy, like you've been wearing them all your life."
Priced from $30 to $38, the caps, made by a staff of 27 in a San Francisco warehouse, were an instant hit: By 1997, Blue Marlin posted wholesale sales of $4 million. This year, sweatshirts and T-shirts joined the lineup. But the partners haven't forgotten their inspiration. Each hat includes a brief league history, and a small piece of the profit goes to nine surviving players. Says Stuebe: "The Negro Leagues were a forgotten era. We're doing something that pays tribute."
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