Chris Koch owes a huge debt to filmmaker Spike Lee. Back in 1996, Lee contacted Koch, then the president of New Era Cap company, which has the official license to make hats for Major League Baseball, about making a New York Yankees hat in red instead of the traditional navy. At the time, producing a cap in anything but a team’s original colors was considered sacrilege, but Koch recognized the potential marketing bonanza of his company’s hats being seen on the head of the trendsetting Lee.

A small batch of red Yankees caps was made for Lee, who was later seen on television at the 1996 World Series wearing them. Almost immediately, the company was deluged with requests for the cap and New Era soon began churning out dozens of color and style variations on not only the New York Yankees caps but those of other popular teams like the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the Boston Red Sox. An urban fashion accessory was born.

“From that point on, a baseball hat was no longer a baseball hat,” says Koch, who became the fourth-generation member of his family to run New Era when he took over as C.E.O. from his father, David, in 2002. Since his ascendance, the company has been transformed from a conservatively run family business, quietly supplying caps to Major League Baseball teams and recognizing modest off-field sales from ardent fans, to a major apparelmaker and style setter, with projected sales of $350 million this year. New Era’s revenues doubled from 2002 to 2005, and Koch, who has worked in almost every division of the company since graduating from high school, has set an ambitious schedule of continuing to double the firm’s sales every four to five years. The latest strategy to achieve that goal is to significantly expand the company’s presence across the pond.

While New Era has been selling its caps in Europe through licensed distributors for the last six years, Koch decided to stake out a bigger claim by opening a flagship store in London, near Piccadilly Circus, last summer, with plans to open stores in Birmingham, Paris, and Amsterdam, later this year. By the end of 2008, Koch expects to have 150 employees in Europe overseeing about $45 million in business, and based on his experience so far, he projects that New Era’s European business can grow by as much as 25 percent a year, compared with its U.S. business, whose growth has leveled off in the high single digits.

Ironically, New Era started off in the fashion-accessory business back in 1920, making hats to go with suits and overcoats, before becoming the main supplier of caps to Major League Baseball teams in the 1930s. Then the company became all about baseball. “Now our baseball hats are seen as accessories again, so I guess it’s come full circle,” Koch says, speaking from the firm’s headquarters in the former Federal Reserve Bank building in downtown Buffalo, where New Era was launched by his great- grandfather Ehrhardt Koch.