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Former Oil Baron creates hat to support frontline workers

Last Updated Apr 8, 2020 at 9:11 am MDT

PHOTO. Supplied. Unparalleled has created a hat to honour the frontline medical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jaret Smith, former forward for the Fort McMurray Oil Barons, started his own clothing line to raise awareness for mental health.

Unparalled Premium Wear is a line of hats with a portion of their monthly sales donated towards the Canadian Mental Health Association.

He decided to also create a hat dubbed “The Super Hero” with the goal of donating 100 per cent of the proceeds towards COVID-19 relief.

“I decided to make these new line of hats to raise some money to go into another fund that I thought would be a good fit and something I think could help benefit some people, there is a lot of people going through a tough time right now and for myself personally, I feel pretty fortune to still have a job right now with all the layoffs going on and unemployment looking like it could reach up to 25% in Alberta, I just thought I could do my best to help out and raise some money and its looking pretty promising right now.”

Smith chose to make the donations to the United Way Local Love in a Global Crisis fund.

“I was looking around and seeing where I could donate, and I didn’t realize how expensive ventilators were for hospitals, when I seen they were $50 to $70-thousand dollars that was kind of out of the question, so I just picked something that I thought was a good fund and good benefit to a lot of people.”

For him this cause hits close to home as his mother is a nurse in Fort McMurray.

“Not only my mom but I have a lot of friends that are nurses as well and I know right now, no matter where they are in the hospital they are working very, very hard to accommodate this and make sure their patients are not getting infected and all the people who are dealing with this are working very hard, more than 12 hour shifts ,so hats off to them.”

He designed the hat to represent all first responder medical workers.

“Without the frontline workers I don’t think any of us would be here where we are today, they do so much for us, not only hospital staff, firefighters, police, EMTS, all those people in the first responder world work so hard to keep us on our feet.”

Just this morning he had one person over 300 hats ordered.

Presale for the hats is on now and Smith is estimating people to receive their orders by the middle of May.

He is also giving a $25 store credit for orders of groups of 10.