When Paul Hedrick left his private equity career to launch Tecovas in 2015, he knew he wanted to sell the brand’s signature cowboy boots a little differently than other traditional Western wear companies. He wanted to sell the boots direct to consumers online — but unlike many other DTC brands, he wasn’t going to wait around for online sales to trickle in.
Instead, Hedrick, now the executive chairman of Tecovas, started 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 aspirations of Tecovas being a DTC company, he didn’t think it made sense to just sit on inventory without sales.
“I basically promised myself, and then my first hire, Brandon, we said, ‘Hey, listen, man, we got to pay the rent with physical sales,’” Hedricks said. “I know we’re doing this online thing but we do not have enough money to test anything real online, unless we’re actually paying the rent with the physical sales.”
Hedrick said doing that not only allowed the company to start off 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 credits that early feedback with the company’s ability to find product-market fit relatively quickly.
He also spoke about how he built the company to both respect the traditions and history associated with cowboy boots and Western wear while also 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 are able to sell them for less because they do everything direct. Tecovas has more than 30 retail stores but still sells largely online.
“We don’t work with distributors today; we’re still not working with any wholesale accounts,” Hedricks said. “Effectively, some of the higher-price players just have a lot of extra padding in there. The other point I’d make is the higher-price players that I thought were really big actually weren’t really selling that many boots. So we ended up actually becoming, you know, essentially the biggest premium player in the category.”
Hedricks also talked about how fundraising was hard at first — many investors thought cowboy boots were too niche — and how Tecovas can ride the pop culture tailwinds surrounding cowboy boots from things like the popularity of the “Yellowstone” TV show to Beyoncé’s recent “Cowboy Carter” album.
“We keep coming back to our mission,” Hedricks said. “It’s that next generation of Western, how can we continue to make an impact on the category? You know, I think we made a pretty big impact on the category by making our core product line really great. We’ve got a lot of room to run on that front. We’re going to be growing a lot doing more of the same.”
