The HammockSource Story

It all begins with an eastern North Carolina tobacco salesman with a wicked inventor's streak, a small stack of handmade hammocks and an old Toyota station wagon. The year: 1971.

That's when Walter R. Perkins Jr., an avid amateur woodworker, founded Hatteras Hammocks®, more or less by accident. He'd crafted a bunch of his own hammocks really just to find out how to make the things, and then, next thing he knew, friends kept asking for one for themselves. Soon enough, Mr. Perkins was selling them out of the trunk of that old Toyota.

And then he had more orders for his crafty creations than he had time to make them, so he started enlisting help from family members. And then he hired a few people. And then he hired a few more.

When big-time outdoor-recreation outfitters L.L. Bean signed on as a Hatteras Hammocks customer not too long after, it dawned on Mr. Perkins that he was no longer an amateur craftsman cramming an out-of-control hobby into now-nonexistent free time, but that he'd landed himself right in the middle of a full-blown hammock-making business!

By 1987, Hatteras Hammocks had blossomed into the world's top hammock producer, vastly outperforming even its closest competitor, the then nearly century-old Original Pawleys Island Rope Hammock®, of Pawleys Island, S.C.

A decade later, and Mr. Perkins had bought the Original Pawleys Island Rope Hammock company, and Hatteras Hammocks Inc. started doing business under the name The HammockSource, to be able to fit both trendsetting brands.

Today The HammockSource is the world's largest manufacturer and seller of hammocks.

Yet it's become a whole lot more than that, too. The Greenville, N.C.-based family company is now not only home to the two most recognized hammock brands on the market, but also to Sawgrass Mills® Outdoor Rugs, makers of exceptional, cottony-soft hand-hooked outdoor floor-coverings; Hatteras Outdoors, crafters of high-end, hand-built outdoor furniture of exotic hardwood and expertly woven all-weather rope; and the Real Deal Brazil, the scrappy little company behind the recycled-truck-tarp hat that lent actor Woody Harrelson no small amount of his considerable cool in the 2009 Hollywood blockbuster Zombieland.

So we're hardly just the go-to source for quality hammocks anymore! Think of us, instead, as your source for relaxation, redefined.