Yeehaw! Welcome back to Inc.‘s 1 Smart Business Story. 
 
Today: Tecovas, the bootmaker kicking butt by serving the growing audience for Western wear.  
 
Read on to discover the secrets of its $300 million business, including:  

How many pairs of Tecovas boots are in your closet? Let me know at [email protected].

With a little help from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, the fast-growing cowboy boot brand captured a loyal fan base with the best customer service around.

BY REBECCA DECZYNSKI, SENIOR EDITOR, INC.

On a Thursday morning in June at the Tecovas store just steps away from Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium, a steady stream of customers peruse the many pairs of cowboy boots on display. I’m sitting on a leather armchair trying on a burgundy pair when I ask Eli, the store associate assisting me, how many pairs of Tecovas he owns. He says 11 or 12. (Over email later, he corrects himself: He has 14, and his fiancée has six.)

Considering the variety here, that answer isn’t so shocking. In the men’s section alone, there are four different toe shapes, eight styles of boots (plus three loafers), and at least nine material options. These are quality boots, with most prices above $300. Last year, Tecovas had over $250 million in sales; this year, it’s set to pass $300 million.

This was always the plan for founder Paul Hedrick. He was just 26 when he quit his six-figure job as a management consultant to sell boots from the back of his SUV, dreaming of competing with industry giants such as Ariat and Lucchese. His story almost sounds like something out of a Hallmark movie: A Harvard-educated Texan who spends his early 20s at McKinsey and L Catterton leaves the corporate world and returns to the Lone Star State to start a cowboy boot company.

Now a decade into business, Tecovas has raised nearly $90 million in funding from investors such as Elephant and Access Capital. It’s been profitable since 2021. “I probably wouldn’t have gotten into it if I didn’t think there was a big opportunity to make a difference and—let’s be clear—build a big business,” says Hedrick.

He isn’t the only one who saw promise in the space. Consider the fact that Boot Barn, a Western-focused retailer, hit $1.9 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025. “The Western market has long been underestimated, dismissed as a niche rather than recognized as a significant growth opportunity,” says Andy Hunt, co-founder of Warby Parker and Elephant, the Tecovas investor. “The fundamentals told a different story: strong brand loyalty, durable margins, and an underserved customer base.”

Now 37, Hedrick is hitting his stride. It’s been a little over three years since he stepped down as CEO, passing the reins to David Lafitte, former chief operating officer of apparel giant Deckers, which owns Ugg and Hoka. But in his new role as executive chairman, Hedrick remains focused on pulling off an unlikely goal: selling authentic cowboy boots at scale.

Like many founders, Hedrick started scrappy. He placed cold calls, brushing up on his Spanish to forge relationships in the capital of cowboy boot manufacturing, León, Mexico. He inspected the brand’s first run of 1,000 boots himself. Today, Tecovas—named for a creek in the Texas Panhandle—operates its boot business out of at least five factories in León.

The brand emphasizes high quality, and its prices reflect that. The Annie, a best-selling style, runs $345. If you’re willing to splurge, you might walk out of the store with $545 ostrich, python, or lizard boots. Those made with alligator will set you back closer to a grand.

Like most upstart fashion businesses, Tecovas launched direct-to-consumer. “We went from basically zero to $40 million in the first three years by just releasing product and having a good engine to sell it,” Hedrick says, meaning: solid performance marketing, strong customer service that translates to great net promoter scores, and word of mouth.

For the first three years of the business, customer service made up the majority of its corporate head count. Hedrick personally responded to customer emails “for the first $3 million of sales.” At one point, Hedrick tried outsourcing, but quickly reversed course. Starting a business without IRL touchpoints made it important for Tecovas to prove its value to customers, he says: “We wanted the best return policy, the best service—no question.”

Hedrick knew that to grow to the next level, the company needed to launch in-person retail. It’s a lot easier to sell boots to people who try them on first. Cowboy boots, in particular, are tricky to fit because of their depth and lack of laces. While you can explain everything a customer should know about size, “nothing quite compares with pulling one onto your foot,” Hedrick says.

Tecovas opened its first store in 2019, in the same building as its Austin headquarters, and quickly saw the benefits. It opened four more that year (three in Texas and one in Oklahoma). The economics of the stores are indisputably good. Each location averages over $4 million in annual sales with EBITDA topping 30 percent per store (industry benchmarks are typically between 10 and 20 percent per store). The company opens new locations where it has existing customer strongholds, and has expanded beyond its Southern base. Today, it has more than 50 stores. Among the most recent is a 4,500-square-foot space in downtown Manhattan, complete with skylights and a bar in the back.

Retail has been pivotal to the company’s growth, and for good reason. Research shows that a majority of customers are more likely to buy from a digitally native brand if it has a physical store, says Brittany Steiger, principal analyst of retail and e-commerce at the global market intelligence agency Mintel.

Last year, Tecovas stepped into wholesale, selling its products at Nordstrom, National Roper’s Supply, and other retailers, both online and in-store. Independent mom-and-pop shops that serve “very authentic consumers who are wearing boots seven days of the week” are essential to Tecovas’s strategy, CEO Lafitte says. Larger retail chains help with exposure, too. In Nashville, just a block away from Tecovas’s Broadway location, a shopper might encounter the brand for the first time amid the stacked shelves of Big Time Boots. An online shopper could order a pair of Tecovas along with a saddle and spurs or a Le Labo perfume and a Bottega Veneta bag, depending on the retailer.

It’s easy to point to pop culture flashpoints like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour or Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter to explain the growth of Tecovas, but Hedrick says it goes beyond that. A person spending hundreds on a concert likely isn’t focused on getting a lot of wear out of their outfit, which means they’re more apt to turn to cheaper boot brands. That is, unless they’ve already bought into Western culture. When a country star like Morgan Wallen, Zac Bryan, or George Strait plays in a city, the closest Tecovas store might see double its normal sales, notes Lafitte.

Hedrick suggests there’s been a broader shift toward Western attire, making it a regular part of Americans’ wardrobes, similar to blue jeans. He also sees a parallel with another style: preppy, which evolved from Ivy League roots into something more mainstream via designers like Tommy Hilfiger. Western style, Hedrick says, is now more integrated into popular fashion: “Everyone’s got a little bit of it. You don’t necessarily need to have the whole look.”

The challenge lies in appealing to a widening demographic without alienating the group that’s been with you from the start. It all comes down to every brand marketer’s favorite buzzword: authenticity. For Tecovas, that means investing in categories that contribute a small percentage to revenue, but have an outsize influence on the brand’s reputation—like its horsemen boots. “For us to be an authentic Western brand, we’d better be making boots that are purpose built for the rider, for the person who’s on a ranch working every day,” says Hedrick.

The founder says he initially envisioned the brand as an evergreen business with a “boring” merchandising strategy, offering boots in classic colorways. “But we learned very quickly that it’s hard to grow a business that doesn’t have a reason to bring customers back,” he says.

Lafitte, who undertook the job of improving Tecovas’s gross margins, which are now near the “high 50s” (or around $200 for the average pair of boots), says that the brand’s ability to be nimble is a testament to its stability. “We know 80 percent of the business is running on this very consistent treadmill,” he says. “It frees us up to act quickly on things that could really move the needle this season.”

Today, alongside classic boot shades are metallics and flashes of color. Tecovas began selling Western apparel in 2018. This year, it launched its first fragrance with Nashville-based Ranger Station. It also had its most viral collab: limited-edition Chili’s cowboy boots made from the restaurant chain’s red booth seats. The boots sold out almost immediately.

With new and limited-edition styles, Tecovas incentivizes customers to buy more. It calls to mind Hill House Home, whose Nap Dress went viral in 2020. With seasonal styles, that company turned its customer base into a fan club: The average customer owns three Nap Dresses, according to founder Nell Diamond. (For top customers, it’s around a dozen.)

If my store associate, Eli, is any indicator, Tecovas has sparked a similar fervor. No longer is the cowboy boot an esoteric footwear option, but something to be embraced in different forms and varieties.

I notice that customers entering the Nashville location don’t fit a particular profile. There’s an older couple who make a full lap around the store, as well as an effervescent bachelorette group that wanders inside, eyeing the boot-branding station. A group of three young men are carded when they take up an associate’s offer of a round of beers on the house.

In this store, the company’s focus on customer service (for which Tecovas is often praised on the ever-captious cowboy boots subreddit) is on full display. Eli patiently helps me try on an array of boots. He suggests I go down a half a size for the Annies. (He’s right.) When my calf muscles don’t yield to the narrower fit of the Abby boot, Eli suggests a trick: using a produce bag to help slide it on. It’s hard to remember the last time I tried shoes on in a store with so much care and attention.

Hedrick modeled his customer service approach after that of restaurateur Danny Meyer, founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and Shake Shack. Hedrick suggests staffers read Meyer’s book, Setting the Table, and he and Lafitte use the term “hospitality” so often you’d think they were in the hotel business.

It’s immediately apparent just how important creating this experience is— customers can see all their choices, try on boots, grab a drink, and linger in this fully realized world for a bit. At a time when companies struggle to cut through the noise online—and when people increasingly value in-person experiences—Tecovas’s focus on hospitality makes sense. “Their stores feel much more like clubhouses, not showrooms,” says James Chester, co-founder and CEO of WVN, an analytics firm for brick-and-mortar retail. “It’s more about wrapping yourself in the ethos of the brand, rather than a transactional relationship. It’s really like, ‘Come in and hang out.’”

Tecovas peddles a romantic vision of the West, one with cowboy-adjacent iconography and Americana that don’t quite edge into direct patriotism. In effect, it extends to customers a sense of kinship in a country that has grown increasingly divisive. “A lot of times, we feel like we’re not just selling boots or apparel. It’s these values of hard work, integrity, being welcoming, genuine, authentic,” Lafitte says. “Those are values that are hard to argue with, whether you’re on the left or the right.”

This story originally appeared on Inc.com.