How Tecovas’s Krista Dalton uses AI to inform business decisions

“Cowboy-core” may have had its pop culture moment recently, but fashion trends aside, it’s an aesthetic that’s as intrinsically linked to American culture as rock and roll, baseball, and apple pie. As such, iconic brands like Wrangler and Stetson built on that image with great success. Today, the western wear sector—everything from hats, boots, jeans, and even bolo ties—is big business far from the ranch (it also makes sayings like “all hat and no cattle” a little less derogatory for those on either side of the Great Plains).

Austin-based western wear brand Tecovas is part of this growth story. In the 10 years since bursting on the scene, it has expanded from a direct-to-consumer boot seller to a bona fide lifestyle brand with over 50 locations across the US.

A brand with an aesthetic rooted in the culture of the American West, it has embraced the AI era to fuel its expansion and help inform major business decisions. Revenue Brew sat down with Krista Dalton, Tecovas’s chief marketing and digital officer, to discuss the meeting point between AI and human intuition for our December 4 virtual event: “Predictive Analytics: Turning Forecasts into Growth.”

AI sidekick

A seasoned marketing and merchandising professional (Dalton cut her teeth at Target and has the distinction of being the first person there to move from stores to dot-com), Tecovas’s CMO isn’t one to outsource decision-making to an AI bot, even if she did go ahead and create one. She used to pore over countless datasets every week—sometimes “16 reports at a time.” To make her job easier she developed an AI agent that combs through reports to show top-line numbers, trends, and opportunities.

“The CMO role has evolved, especially in recent years, so that you are chief storyteller, you are the brand protector, but you also are an operator and you’re a numbers person,” she said. “You are somebody who has to know how to show up in every meeting.”

While AI is doing crucial legwork, Dalton makes it clear she still wants to roll up her sleeves and get a handle on the data herself.

“I’m still old-school, AI old-school, which means like three months old. I still want to see the data myself and play with it myself in order to know it because I need to know it in meetings off the top of my head,” Dalton said.

Dalton says she didn’t trust the agent when she first started using it.

“I didn’t trust the numbers. I knew about hallucinations. I knew that numbers weren’t the jam of most AI, so it took a while for me to gain trust,” Dalton said. “The place I’m at now is: The data is here. Let me go see if I can understand because there’s qualitative things that an AI doesn’t know.”

Working out workwear

Brand extension has been the name of the game for Tecovas, and one of the areas of opportunity it was eyeing even before Dalton’s AI agent came to existence was workwear (it was actually the brainchild of CEO David Lafitte).

For this endeavor, AI’s findings worked in lockstep with human insights. The highlight of the strategy was “closeting,” where Dalton’s team visited customer homes and looked through closets. She said one key finding was that some people who wore work boots typically kept a spare pair on hand in case the original pair got damaged.“We actually had a potential year to a year and a half lead time of really onboarding new customers because they already had the second pair on deck,” Dalton said. This gave Tecovas insight into shopping patterns that were different from other shoe categories, and then the time and space for AI-powered research to supercharge the process.

“That research phase was absolutely aided by AI more than any other phase,” Dalton said. “The creation of the shoe, my merchandising partner always tells me, like ‘get out of ChatGPT. You can’t merchandise with ChatGPT.’ Because the generative AI really can’t create the products we want, but [for] the idea, the scoping, and the research phase, AI is unbeaten.”

Tecovas’s workwear category launched successfully in late 2024, and has just expanded to include women’s workwear.

Inventory overhaul

Tecovas continued its embrace of AI this fall with its partnership with invent.ai, an AI decisioning platform that helps predict store-level product demand. Through a pilot conducted prior to the partnership, Tecovas saw a 2% increase in Weighted in Stock (a key inventory metric), a 2.7% increase in apparel and accessories on shelves, and a 20% increase in new product sales.

“What they’re able to do at scale because of the data ingestion is game-changing for planning,” Dalton said. “It can take into account profitability, and it can say, ‘how many assortment boxes, with different variations of sizing, should we create to optimize the send to the stores to best fit the profile of sales that we’ve had?’” Dalton explained.

Can there ever be too much data? Dalton doesn’t seem to look at it this way.

“I don’t ever think there’s too much data,” she said. “What’s that phrase? ‘There are three kinds of lies: a blatant lie, a silly lie, and then a statistic.’ So I think there is data that can mislead and that’s something really important to be aware of.”