When Paul Hedrick left a career in private equity to start Tecobas in 2015, he wanted to sell the brand's signature cowboy boots in a slightly different way than other traditional western wear companies: He wanted to sell the boots online and directly to consumers, but unlike many other DTC brands, he didn't want to wait for online sales to slowly ramp up.
Instead, Hedrick, who is now Tecobus' chairman, began selling the boots, loaded into the back of his Toyota Forerunner, at farmers' markets in Dallas, Texas, and at his old elementary school. In a recent episode of Found, Hedrick said that despite Tecobus's dreams of becoming a DTC company, he didn't think it made sense to have a pile of unsold inventory.
“I made a promise to myself, and to my first hire, Brandon, that, 'Hey, listen, we have to pay our rent with our brick-and-mortar sales,'” Hedricks says. “I know we're doing it online, but unless we're paying our rent with our brick-and-mortar sales, we don't have the funds to test something real online.”
Hedrick said that not only did this allow the company to start in the black and avoid losing money, it also provided valuable customer feedback on what the company was doing and what customers thought of the product. Hedrick believes that this early feedback helped the company find product-market fit relatively quickly.
He also talked about how he founded the company to bring innovation to the field while respecting the tradition and history associated with cowboy boots and western wear.
Tecobas makes its boots in Guanajuato, Mexico, a city in the North American country known for its leather goods, especially cowboy boots. Hedrick said that while it makes its boots alongside competitors, it does it all directly, which allows it to sell them at a lower price. Tecobas has more than 30 retail stores, but still sells primarily online.
“Right now we don't work with distributors. We don't work with wholesalers yet,” Hedricks says. “In fact, some of the higher-priced manufacturers just put a lot of extra padding inside. The other thing I'd point out is that the higher-priced manufacturers that I thought were really big didn't actually sell that many boots. So we've essentially become the largest premium manufacturer in the field.”
Hedricks also talked about how difficult it was to raise capital initially (many investors thought cowboy boots were too niche) and how Tecobus is able to ride the pop culture momentum surrounding cowboy boots, from the popularity of the TV show “Yellowstone” to Beyonce's latest album, “Cowboy Carter.”
“We always go back to our mission,” Hedricks said. “The next generation of Western. How can we continue to impact the space? I think we've had a pretty significant impact on the space by making our core product line really great. We still have a lot of room to grow in that respect. We plan to continue doing the same thing and grow big.”