In early 2020, a few months after losing her father to cancer, Mercedes Maddox left her accounting job in New York City to join the American Hat Company, the cowboy hat business based in Bowie, Texas, that her family had owned since 2003. “During the pandemic I realized it was time for me to come into the family businesses and work side-by-side with my mom,” Mercedes says. Which is how, a year later, she found herself at an American Hat Company-sponsored rodeo in Lincoln, Nebraska—where Jake Bloomer just so happened to be too.
Like Mercedes, Jake is also part of a Western family business: He’s the vice president of Bloomer Trailers, a premier custom horse trailer manufacturer founded by his father 20 years ago. Although the two had never met, their parents had; the Texas Western industry is a small one. So Jake went up and introduced himself. Instantly, he had a crush.
Mercedes was in a relationship at the time, so their first meeting was just that: a meeting. But: “On the day we met, Jake told my mom to please let him know if I was ever single again because he wanted to be the first guy to take me on a date,” Mercedes says. (He called her “a unicorn.”) From that point on, “Jake and I continued to run into each other at events…and our friendship eventually blossomed into a relationship.”
Jake and Mercedes got engaged on July 18, 2023, at the Cowtown Coliseum, an arena in the Fort Worth Stockyards. It was a setting ripe with meaning: “I am from Fort Worth, and one of our businesses, The Best Hat Store, is right in the heart of the Fort Worth Stockyards,” says Mercedes. “My late father’s celebration of life was at the Cowtown Coliseum and he was inducted into the Texas Trail of Fame.” The honor included recieving a star on the sidewalk in front of the building.
Mercedes’s mother and sister, Treasure Maddox, convinced her to go to the Coliseum for what they claimed would be a walkthrough of the new American Hat suite there. As she approached the stands, however, Mercedes saw Jake standing in the center of the arena—which was covered in hurricane candles. On the jumbotron were pictures of them together, as well as an image of her late father. Jake wanted him to feel present in the proposal, as he’d “never had the opportunity to ask him for my hand in marriage,” says Mercedes.
