Paul Hedrick

Meet Paul Hedrick: Founder of Tecovas 

With Tecovas, Bootstrapper Paul Hedrick Hits His Stride

The popular Western boot company heads into new territory with the web brand’s first retail store, opening soon in Austin.

Paul Hedrick got the idea to start a Western boot company in, of all places, Greenwich, Connecticut. After growing up in Dallas, he went off to Harvard and, like a lot of smart young people with analytical minds, started a career in management consulting. At 26 he was working for a private-equity firm in Greenwich and traveling across the country to meet with entrepreneurs in all kinds of fields—a candy company in Chicago, a dental implant maker in Denver, a restaurant chain in Dallas. He started getting itchy to create something himself. His boss was sympathetic, so one day in early 2014, they met for a brainstorming session. Hedrick crossed his legs at one point and looked down. He was wearing a pair of $600 ostrich cowboy boots.

“I always loved wearing them in Greenwich, where penny loafers outnumbered cowboy boots infinity to one,” he remembers. He’d been the kind of kid who wore boots and shorts to the grocery store. He’d spent childhood summers riding horses in Montana and Colorado. At Harvard, he took to wearing boots as a sort of badge of Texanness in a foreign land. But the price of his favorite footwear always frustrated him. At the time of his fateful conversation, a whole generation of new brands had risen in New York that reinvented the business model for everything from eyeglasses (Warby Parker) to mattresses (Casper) by cutting out retail-middleman markups and selling wares directly to consumers online at lower prices. In a flash, the concept for Hedrick’s start-up came to him: he would launch such a brand focused on Western boots. And he would do it in Texas, the country’s largest boot market. 

A little research convinced him he was on to something. As it turned out, the annual market for Western boots in the U.S. alone was more than $3 billion. Even if Hedrick managed to seize just one percent of that market, he’d have a handsome business. Better yet, nobody in the New York–centric apparel start-up world seemed to be paying any attention to Western wear, and nobody in the traditional boot business seemed to be in a hurry to shake up the nice thing they had going. Hedrick was staring at a wide-open runway.

Lean and mustachioed, Hedrick comes off like a Hollywood casting agent’s dream young Texan. Along with a well-worn pair of Tecovas (the Cartwright style, in bourbon calf leather), he’s wearing Tecovas jeans (in the slim fit, which has just enough width at the bottom to slip over a pair of boots) and a Tecovas belt. In addition to several styles of men’s and women’s boots—from basic ropers, starting at $195, to flashier ostrich and lizard numbers —the company began selling leather accessories in 2017 and launched a denim collection last year, with an eye toward becoming a full-service Western brand. Even the more exotic leather boots, like the ones made of caiman belly, have a clean, restrained aesthetic—no square toes, no elaborate contrast stitching. These are boots that could feel at home in the boardroom. 

That was 2014, and in the seven years since then, Hedrick has relocated to Austin, launched Tecovas, expanded into new product lines and opened retail outposts in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and, as of June, Aspen, Colorado. Along the way, he's picked up mentors (and Tecovas board members) including Bonobos founder Brian Spaly, Warby Parker co-founder Andy Hunt, YETI co-founder Roy Seiders and Nike alum Elliott Hill.