The Exchanges

Q Yeah. They're like, you're coming down here, you're telling us what to do, you're like, 26, who do you think you are?

A I was a hard guy to work with, for sure, for a factory. You know, the reason that we turned it, I mean, listen, at the end of the day, they just wanted business, and I told them that we would sell 2000 pairs. They didn't really believe me, but they, they were just surprised that I came back for a reorder, and I came back for a reorder three months in. I said, I actually, I'm on track to sell all 2000 over the four months. I think, ultimately, no matter how much I pissed anyone off with being an annoying client to work with, We ultimately won with business and doing what we said we were going to do.

AI assessment note: “I was a hard guy to work with, for sure, for a factory.”

Q and really sort of Browns. The colors in there are very, even the wood is very leathery looking, and you go in, and I guess you get a drink. You get a glass of bourbon or something if you want, and they'll shine your boots, and tell me about that experience, because it seems very, like, there's a lot going on there. What did you want the store to be?

A I want it to be fun. We were a very, we had a very fun internal culture, and I wanted to translate that to, to our customers, and I wanted to think about all of the things that we could say yes to. Like, could we have a bar in the store that served free drinks? Could we, you know, have boot shines? And now we do personalization in store. We started branding boots last year, and You know, finally, I think we've been able to give the customer what they want when you invest in that. When you invest 400 dollars in a pair of boots, you want, you want not, you want it to fit right. So, okay, we've got boot stretchers in store. Oh, you want to be able to personalize. It's a gift. Okay, we'll be able, we'll just say yes to you for that. You want to bring your old pair in and get it shined. Okay, we'll say yes to you for that. It's, it's an investment. And, you know, the stores have really allowed us to kind of come full circle on delivering that promise.

AI assessment note: “I want it to be fun. We were a very, we had a very fun internal culture”

Q And who was he, who, like, what was his job?

A His title was, I think, growth lead. So we had ended up raising some angel capital, and one of the guys who I had reached out to about raising money was an angel investor out in DC. Brandon had been working for him, so he actually called me, and I was, I mean, I, he didn't know, but I was sort of Desperate for help, and I had already tried to convince a family friend to join me. I tried to, I hit up the McKinsey and Bain message boards and try to convince people to join me, and, but, you know, Brandon was hungry. I told him, listen, what I don't know how to do is market. It's very clear that we're going to need to learn how to digital market, and we're going to have to learn the universe of, of social media. How about you figure that out? So, you know, we started testing digital marketing very early. Uh, we started working with an agency on Facebook advertising probably by that January.

AI assessment note: “His title was, I think, growth lead.”

Q people forget where the narrative was. Brick and mortar is dead. You know, it's just a waste of money. Um, obviously Warby Parker did brick and mortar away. Other brands, all birds. For some of these brands, it worked. For some, it didn't. But what was the thinking behind it? When the, sort of, the conventional wisdom was like, it's dead. No one's going to be doing brick and mortar.

A Yeah, so, I mean, I go back to, like, the original inspiration for a boot, and it was the, man, the cowboy boot is the, it has a story. People have a story about how they bought it, how they found it, or whether they got handed it down, whether they got it at the thrift store, whether their grandfather gave it to them, and I just think, I kind of thought, listen, this, I feel like we're almost succeeding in spite of our business model, not because of it. And I wanted this creative outlet. I wanted, I had this vision of hospitality for the brand that, that went way further than the customer experience associates because There isn't really anything that special about really good customer service if it's still limited to phone, email, and chat. And then I had these theories that there was also a gap in the market. There was no premium contemporary brand in the space, and now we are the premium contemporary brand. And if you go look at what premium contemporary brands do, they grow through retail. Go look at Lululemon. They're the primary example. And I kind of considered ourselves the Lululemon of Boots. You had to kind of touch it to believe it, feel it to believe it, fit it to believe it. It kind of felt like that was our equivalent. And there was no premium contemporary retail. You basically had independent specialty retailers, and then you had big box retailers, but you didn't…

AI assessment note: “You had to kind of touch it to believe it, feel it to believe it”

Q And did that pay off, the Facebook ads?

A Yeah, we were, man, there was a combination of there not being any other, I think, Western boot brands advertising at the time, and us having a really compelling value proposition, and candidly, man, we had product market fit, and people loved the boots, and so we were able to advertise Pretty early, and I mean, I think we were paying ourselves like 50 grand, so we had, you know, enough capital to test. And, you know, it turned into a game of when the dollars had to go out the door for the next order, and how much we could afford on advertising that week, and what is our stock level, and how much when our stock level goes down, does our, does our return on advertising spend go down, and tweaking it to become almost like a trading floor. And then I, on the other, while he was managing the spend, I was going down to Mexico every month, and I mean, I was negotiating all the way down to the time frame, so I would say, alright, this is the date that we're, we're gonna commit to the overall quantity, and then a few weeks later, this is the date that we're gonna commit to the color makeup, so we can buy that leather order, then here's the date we're gonna agree on the actual size cut, and it was as, you know, As late as possible so I could have as much inventory data as possible and had a constant kind of model flowing. So only because of that were we able to Attract eyeballs, convert…

AI assessment note: “basically got two million revenue out of it and broke even.”

Q a relief, because you didn't have the same level of stress and just constant fires. But on the other hand, you didn't have the same level of stress and constant fires, which is also extremely You know, it's stimulating. And all of a sudden, like, not as many phone calls, not as many emails, like you're not needed in the same way. How did you personally cope with that change?

A Well, it's been an evolution. And you're right, a lot goes out the door. It's been a sort of an extreme exercise in self-awareness, and there are days when I realize my ego hasn't been filled up, and I haven't done the things that I used to do that give me creative fulfillment, and those days are hard. And what I would say is, it's not for everyone. To be clear, some people should run their businesses forever. Some people Need to be told to get out of the way. Uh, some people need to be told to go away. But one blind spot that I think I've noticed in myself when I reflect is that it's taken me about three years, I think, to realize that my style that I had was actually really good for the first, you know, seven or eight years, and maybe would have been a little bit challenging in these next five years, and I've been a lot more reflective and grateful, I think, recently, but it took me a while to get there.

AI assessment note: “It's been a sort of an extreme exercise in self-awareness”

Q So, how did you come up with a name, Tecovas? Because Tecovas, I think it's like a geological formation or something. Tell me what it is.

A Man, coming up with a name for any brand is so... Frustrating, because it all starts with a lawyer, or at least it ends with a lawyer, and nothing's available, and I had a few names that I wanted to use that weren't available. The Tecova's name came from a brainstorming exercise. We actually found a friend of the agency was a graduate student at Texas, I think majoring in linguistics, I don't even remember, and they kind of used him as a contractor every now and then for Naming. And I said, I want it to be a Texas-based name, and I want it to come from something real. And he basically came up with a list of 10, and, you know, we'd been told by the lawyers to pick something relatively obscure, and we kind of picked the most obscure one, honestly, but it felt right to them. I would say I didn't really like it at first, to be honest.

AI assessment note: “The Tecova's name came from a brainstorming exercise.”

Q And I guess that, that firm at L. Catterton, that sort of was focused on investing in, in, like, consumer retail businesses, right?

A Yeah, so for context, I don't know how to put this, but when I was a kid, I was, I felt like I was destined to be in consumer. I loved stuff. I loved cars. I liked gadgets. I, I subscribed to Architectural Digest and, you know, Road and Track and Popular Science. I was always interested in I mean, listen, I think I was interested in consumerism and didn't know how to put it. And so basically I got a call, a recruiting call to work at this firm, which at the time was still, I mean, it had been around for a long time, since since 1989, I believe, but only in recent years had established its reputation as really like the consumer retail firm. And I became I was Sent to Chicago, and, uh, where we had just made the firm's largest investment at the time. Uh, we had merged two candy businesses, and we had to do a lot of post-merger work, and.

AI assessment note: “established its reputation as really like the consumer retail firm”

Q get pre-orders or some, or, or get some good payment terms or raise money, but it was more than you had. I mean, you were going to have to spend about 200 grand. On these, but, uh, and what was the timeframe? I mean, did you, again, like at that point, did you like put a deposit down and say, okay, here's the first 30 grand, let's go, let's start?

A Yeah, at this point, so much time, I had wasted so much time trying to get the other factory on board, and we're well into the spring, you know, my funds are dwindling, we get all the way into the summer, but it got so bad that actually I got handed off to the factory next door for To the one that I had originally worked with because they were busy with their other orders as I'm on factory number three. You know, I basically had to start development fresh with them and I had negotiated to spread out the minimum as much as I could. I said, how long can I spread it out? And they said four months and I said, okay, well, in my head, I'm like, well, I am obviously gonna run out of money. But if I launch the brand, I'll get revenue coming in, and I don't have any other costs, so the revenue should be just enough to pay for the, uh, yeah, the rough mass should work, I should be okay.

AI assessment note: “I said, how long can I spread it out? And they said four months”