The American West has given us many idioms over the years: you can bet the ranch; riding shotgun; all hat, no cattle. If you’ve been following the rise of western-style apparel companies, full of cowboy and cowgirl garb from 10-gallon hats to giant belt buckles, you might also hear “grab the bull by the horns.” For Tecovas, the 10-year-old boot and western-style retailer, that phrase takes on a layered meaning when it comes to its revenue strategy: emphasize the input of its marketing team to continue growing through its core audience. Rather than have one dedicated revenue team, Tecovas delegates revenue responsibilities to all of its departments—from marketing to corporate finance.
“So I am both revenue generating, and I am the marketing team,” Krista Dalton, CMO and SVP of e-commerce at Tecovas, said. “But the marketing team needs to think of themselves not as revenue generating, because that’s a little transactional, but we’re all one company. My point of view on this is we need to be [in] lockstep, because if marketing ever feels like, ‘oh, finance gave me a goal to hit; they don’t understand,’ then you’re not one team.”
Tecovas has taken this symbiosis and applied it to, of all things, TikTok. It partnered (heh) with a team of influencers across the country to boost its brand recognition, competing with industry stalwarts, like Lucchese, which have had a head start of over a century.
Videos, like one featuring influencer Emmie Sperandeo on horseback sporting spurs, raked in 736k views and almost 70k likes. Another video featuring influencer Emily Ann Roberts taking her husband to get a fresh pair of boots corralled 4.4M views and 450k likes.
Another rodeo for the company: branded content. Working with Yellowstone stars Jen Landon and Jefferson White, the company ran an ad campaign highlighting a Tecovas x Yellowstone collection during the hit TV show’s fifth season premiere.
According to ModernRetail, when Tecovas ran ads during Yellowstone Season 5, it saw web traffic spike 6x, with 78% of those visitors identified as new customers.
The brand has continued its partnership with the show and benefitted from Yellowstone’s record-breaking Season 5 premiere with 16 million viewers tuning in. By the end of the night, the episode ranked as the most social in the show’s history, generating 3.5x more interactions than the Season 4 premiere.
From DTC to brick-and-mortar
These successful branding strategies created a fork-in-the-road moment for the company. Originally a DTC boot brand that disrupted a stuffy western wear industry, Tecovas has gone from one of the cowboy boot industry’s most online brands to its fastest growing company, according to Charm Analytics data.
The company then began opening brick-and-mortar locations in key western wear hubs like Louisville, Kentucky, Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas—where the company opened its flagship location in 2019.
Now, Tecovas is taking a chance as it continues to open stores, this time in nontraditional markets such as New York, Miami, and Pittsburgh. As for how these locations are selected, Tecovas uses marketing data that it has collected for years.
In 2024 alone, the brand cut the ribbon on 11 new stores across the US. It plans to open 14 more in 2025, which will bring up the total store count to 56 by year’s end, according to the Business of Fashion.
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“We have tremendous data at our fingertips,” Sam Fodrowski, vice president of brand marketing at Tecovas, said. “We have been able to see, historically—especially this year and in 2024—what the effect is of opening a new store. Are we putting the right investment levels against the store? Are we setting the right goals and forecasts for sales for those stores when they open?”
New (fashion) sheriff in town
It also doesn’t hurt that western wear seems to be the new sheriff in fashion. According to projected data from economic analysis group Maximize Market Research, from 2024–2032 compound annual growth in the western wear space is expected to hold at 5%.
This would place the industry’s market value at $152 billion by the end of that timeframe; it currently sits at $103 billion, according to the same study.
From the outside, it looks as though Tecovas is expanding quickly to capitalize on a western wear trend that has customers strutting into stores. But if you ask Tecovas, it would tell you to hold your horses.
When asked if the current popularity of western wear influenced its retail strategy, Dalton said: “Gonna be blunt, no.”
Dalton added: “If you’re opening a store, that’s a two-year process. From leasing, finding the right spot, finding the square footage, you need to be thinking about dollars per square foot or EBITDA per square foot in order to determine if opening a store is the right space—along with leasing rules. And that timeline is so long that if you’re basing it off what you consider a trend, you could really get in front of your skis in a bad way.”
The company, which pulled in more than $250 million in net sales in 2024 according to Tecovas founder Paul Hedrick, is instead following the well-worn path of other DTC darlings like Allbirds, Madewell, and Casper: using physical stores to shore up some of the bottlenecks that the DTC approach creates.
$tores
Turns out, people like trying on boots and posting their fits to social media. Dalton said that internal data has actually shown that opening new stores reduces online sales in the first year, but after that time has elapsed, the two buying options start to boost revenue in tandem.
“When we open a store, we do know we acquire more new customers with foot traffic, and then they come back to us as an e-comm shopper,” Dalton said. “And that’s kind of the best of all worlds.”
Alex Milovic, a professor of marketing and sales at Marquette University, said Tecovas’s reluctance to buy into a trend is the right one.
“Make sure to listen to your core audience,” Milovic told Revenue Brew. “Don't anger your core audience. What you don’t want to do, you don’t want to develop things for this new target that don’t match. You can develop it, but then make sure that you’re always offering what you offer to your original customers, because if they bounce, then you’re in trouble.”