When Paul Hedrick left his career in private equity to start Tecovas in 2015, he knew he wanted to sell the brand’s signature cowboy boots a little differently than other traditional western clothing companies. He wanted to sell the boots directly to consumers online — but unlike many other DTC brands, he wasn’t going to wait for online sales to take off.
Instead, Hedrick, now the executive chairman of Tecovas, began selling his boots out of the back of his Toyota Forerunner at farmers markets and at his old elementary school in Dallas, Texas. Hedrick said on a recent episode of Found that despite Tecovas ambitions to be a DTC company, he didn’t think it made sense to just sit on the stock with no sales.
“I basically promised myself, and then my first hire, Brandon, we said, ‘Hey, listen, man, we’ve got to pay the rent with physical sales,'” Hendricks said. “I know we’re doing this online thing, but we don’t have enough money to try anything real online unless we’re paying the rent with physical sales.”
Hedrick said this not only allowed the company to start in the black and never dip into the red, but also to gain valuable customer feedback on what the company was doing and how people felt about the product. Hedrick believes early feedback matches the company’s ability to find product markets relatively quickly.
He also talked about how he built the company to respect the traditions and history associated with cowboy boots and western wear, while bringing something innovative to the category.
Tecovas makes its boots in Guanajuato, Mexico, a municipality in the North American country known for its leather goods and more specifically, its cowboy boots. Hedrick said that while they make their boots alongside their competitors, they can sell them cheaper because they do everything directly. Tecovas has more than 30 retail stores, but still sells largely online.
“We don’t work with distributors today. we still don’t work with wholesale accounts,” Hedricks said. “Essentially, some of the higher priced players just have a lot of extra padding in there. The other point I would like to make is that the higher priced players that I thought were too big actually didn’t sell that many boots. So we ended up becoming, you know, essentially the biggest premium player in the category.”
Hedricks also talked about how difficult it was to raise money at first—many investors thought cowboy boots were too niche—and how Tecovas can ride the pop culture winds around cowboy boots from things like the popularity of television show “Yellowstone” to Beyoncé’s recent “Cowboy Carter” album.
“We keep coming back to our mission,” Hendricks said. “This is the next generation Western, how can we continue to make an impact in the category? You know, I think we made a really big impact in the category by making our core product line really great. We have a lot of room to run on that front. We’ll grow a lot by doing more of the same.”
