Tecovas: Paul Hedrick

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/d81430b8e927189e

I became pretty product obsessed. So much so that actually when when we launched
I actually flew to Mexico. They the production run wasn't done yet. I think I flew there the first weekend of November.
I stayed there.
Until I inspected every single pair.
Yeah, personally
And was rejecting a lot and was I mean it took weeks.
Longer than expected. I was
How did you keep the the factory owner from just really getting pissed off at you?
Well, I don't think I did.
I think they did get pissed off at me.
Ha ha
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.
They built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today.
How Paul Hedrick made a sketch of a cowboy boot in Microsoft Paint and turned that into Takova's.
Now one of the most popular brands of Western wear
In the country.
Westernware is kind of having a moment.
Actually, it's had a lot of moments.
For decades, cowboy boots and denim have gone in and out of fashion.
And it's not necessarily been driven by country singers. You've seen this stuff on actors, politicians, athletes, anyone who wants to add some swagger and maybe even an inch or two to their step.
And right now.
Westernware seems like it's everywhere again.
Thanks in no small part to TV shows like Yellowstone and even Beyonce.
Her cowboy Carter tour has reignited the trend.
Her fans are showing up in boots and hats and fringe and rhinestones.
They're creating a whole new wave of Western chic that's taken over arenas and Instagram feet.
And the numbers back this up.
Sales of cowboy boots jumped.
twenty percent in the first two weeks after the release of Beyonce's country themed album.
Levi's and Cowboy Hats had a banner year last year.
And so did the brand we're talking about today.
Cobas.
About ten years ago, long before cowboy boots were back in the spotlight,
A guy named Paul Hedrick saw an opportunity.
Paul didn't come from fashion.
He wasn't a designer.
He was just a guy who grew up in Texas, and he thoughtboy boots were either too expensive or too cheap.
There wasn't much in between. So Paul decided to create that in-between brand with Takova's.
And from the very beginning, he obsessed over every detail. He sketched the designs himself.
He shaped the product line, he traveled to Leon, Mexico, where the boots are still made, to personally inspect each pair.
Today, beyond just cowboy boots, the company sells jeans, shirts, dresses, belts, and bags.
In this year, Tikova's expects to do more than$300 million in sales.
And while much of their success started online,
Paul made a surprising bet on brick and mortar stores.
Tacobas
Now has more than forty of these stores across the US.
Paul Hedgerick was born in Houston in the late 1980s. When he was around seven, his family moved to Dallas, where his dad ran the local office for McKinsey, and perhaps unsurprisingly,
Texas would become a big part of Paul's identity.
There's like almost uh
a responsibility that comes with being a Texan, of representing it, of

Uh it's one of the most recognizable state outlines, you know, one of the most recognizable shapes in the world. It's sort of just
It kinda comes with the territory. You feel like
You were born into
Something that matters a bit more.
It could be a negative cycle, depending on how you view Texas, but
I had actually mixed feelings about that, and I think a lot of people
Do
And
I wanted to leave for at least a while.
You know, I didn't even apply to any schools in Texas, for example, when kinda came
time to decide about college and whatnot. And so
But yeah, I was always very proud of of where I was from. I you know became a proud Dallas site, was a big Dallas sports fan.
Growing up and it was nice having a sense of place.
Yeah, and I and imagine you were
probably a pretty good student. You went to Harvard for college and around two thousand six. You studied economics.
And I I guess after that you kinda followed in your in your dad's footsteps, um, which is you worked as a consultant at McKinsey for a spell and then you went to go work in private equity at a place called El Catterton. Yeah.
And I guess that
that firm El at El Catterton, that sort of was focused on investing in in like
consumer retail businesses, right?
Yeah, so for context, I don't know how to put this, but I when I was a kid I was I felt like I was destined to be in consumer. I love stuff, I loved cars, I liked gadgets, I
I subscribe to Architectural Digest and uh Roden Track and Popular Sci I I I was always interested in
I mean listen, I think I was interested in consumerism and didn't know how to do
How to put it.
And so basically I got a call, a recruiting call to work at
Mm-hmm.
this firm which at the time was still I mean it was it had been around for a long time, since since nineteen eighty nine, 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
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 And so you were involved in in the operations side of that?
Yeah, basically for about eighteen out of my next twenty four months, I kinda became sort of a chief of staff.
And I sat at a desk.
Uh a candy company.
What were the businesses?
Uh they were called Farley's and Saithers.
And Ferrara Pan.
Sure.
And they were merged together to become Ferrara Candy Company.
Got it. Yeah, I'm looking at I mean they own wow. So this is a company that has like massive well known brands, sweet tarts and nerds and
Gobstoppers and lemon heads and jellybellies. I mean, so I mean, so they've since thrown a lot. Now they got yeah. It's a big candy conglomerate.
Roughly, what was the what was the revenue of a company like that when you were when you were doing consulting?
Yeah, they were just under a billion.
God, it's amazing how you just take all these brands.'Cause
You think like when was the last time, you know, I ate a red hot or a lemonhead, but then you know, you put these brands together and you're like
There's a lot of children.
in the world in the United States to eat this stuff.
Man guy, it's a lot of sugar, and I don't really eat sugar anymore, so it's kinda funny that that's where I cut my teeth in many ways.

Alright, so you you end up working for Catterton.
For a couple years, and I guess you start to come to the conclusion that maybe it's time to go to business school.
And so you apply to top business schools, Harvard, Stanford. What did you did you apply to those business schools?
thinking like this will be
sort of a transitional period f to help me think about what I want to do next, or did you kinda have a an idea in mind of what you wanted to do?
Well, I wrote an essay about what I wanted to do. It must have been really bad because
Uh I didn't even get an interview. For either either of the schools. For either school. And what what was the essay about?
I actually wrote about how I wanted to start a sandwich restaurant and
I'm not sure I believed in it.
I had actually thought it about getting into the franchise business.
But I honestly thought
at the time that writing an essay about being a franchisee to get into one of those schools was not gonna be good enough to get me in. Yeah. And so I sort of changed the essay to well I'll start a sandwich company.
And yeah, I mean listen, my heart was not in it.
Alright, so you don't get into the business schools, you don't even get an interview with either of these schools.
And that must have stung a little bit, or maybe more than a little bit.
It really stung. I hadn't even thought about a backup plan and I kinda believed I I'd read somewhere about burning the bridges.
And I think I knew in in the back of my head that
I needed to burn bridges to consolidate my choices and so I had actually given up my lease in Manhattan
To a friend.
And so I was kinda homeless and that was sort of a a forcing mechanism to thart to start to think about what was next. That was the catalyst.
Yeah, basically I I went to a happy hour with one of my colleagues at Catterton.
And man, I think we just had just enough beer.
To
Uh start to talk.
About
Uh I think we asked a pretty naive question, which is
You know, how hard could it be?
Two.
To start one of these companies.
Yeah, like a CPG brand. Yeah. And I was always comparing myself to my colleagues at McKinsey and Catterton, and I think the one thing I noticed at first was that
They were all really type A hard workers, but a lot of them were working hard, not necessarily working smart.
I also noticed I had a crazy risk tolerance compared to most of them.
And then the third thing I noticed was
I was creative.
And I almost none of my colleagues at either of those firms had really
had an interest in being creative. All of them were pretty gung ho about
Just business and I
My decision ultimately became one about hey, if I if I'm starting a company, first of all, I can be creative. Uh basically every decision could be a creative one.
So
You've been brainstorming in your head at least about
I don't know, w like what what other ideas were you thinking about? Restaurants? Yeah, I went down the rabbit hole of of beverage company, specifically a coffee company.
was planning to start the first canned cold brew coffee beverage company, which at the time would have been
Fairly innovative.
I kinda put my
consulting hat on and I thought about idea archetypes. Yeah, I kinda had a Warby Parker for X, Airbnb for X, and then a few other, you know, more esoteric ideas and
Yeah we
Airbnb for storage, for example.
Mm-hmm. Actually the one that I got very close to doing was Coffins.
Hm.
Making and selling coffins.
Yeah, basically there was I had realized that there was one public company that controlled the
vast majority of both the production and the and the sale.
of coffins and it was through this crazy
funeral home network.
Anyway, uh Cowboy Boots was actually the first idea I had.
Right. And almost the entire process between like March and July
I was almost trying to convince myself not to do it, uh because it was the first idea. I was like, There's no way my first idea can be the right one.
You know, it's gonna be perceived as a niche category.
I kept thinking of reasons not to do it.
Yeah.
I wanna go back to cowboy boost in a sec, but
on the coffins idea. Cause that's actually a great idea.
Right. Like it makes me think of Warby Parker, you know, like Luxotica controlled
the glasses industry that you know, whether it was Ray Bans or whatever, they uh they they own tons of brands.
And Warby Parker's premise was, well, glasses aren't to be so expensive. There's no reason why they're just artificially inflated. I imagine it's the same with coffins. I imagine the margins on coffins are incredible because
When someone dies
Oftentimes there's money left, right? And so
Mm
the whole funeral industry knows that, and not to say that they're necessarily exploiting it, but oftentimes there's money to pay for
the funeral and and you know the cremation or or or the burial in the coffin, and you know, it can run twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars.
Or more, depending on how it's done, and so
it would be really interesting to try and get into that business, right? The coffin business is morbid, but I mean it is an interesting idea.
Yeah, it's funny.
You're right. Uh the it turns out at the time the death industry was about sixteen billion, I believe coffins were
Over a third of that. God. It's those boring things that no one thinks about. Totally.
I'm looking at this now. Matthews and Batesfield Casket are the two largest companies in the industry. So Yeah, Batesfield was the one that I was talking about. And I'm sure they want to protect their
Mo, so anybody listening who starts a coffin business, don't say I gave you that idea. I don't want Hatesville to come after me.
They'll know where to bury me. Well, here's the thing about coffins too, it's it's a secularly declining industry now that everyone's getting cremated, so it wouldn't have been necessarily a growth category. Well maybe urns. Maybe like you can take on the urns business or something, you know what I mean? Like Yeah.
Alright, so you so you're kinda brainstorming, and and let's just get to cowboy boots for a second, because
You know, there's a cliche and I everyone listening who's ever worked with a Texan
has experiences.
That guy comes into the office with his Texas cowboy boots.
And uh, you know.
Kind of swaggering in.
Not to say I'm I'm hostile to this. I love Texas.
But we've all experienced this. We've w people worked with Texans, like
in London or Seattle or whatever, like that guy is coming in with his cowboys and you were that guy.
at the office in
Connecticut.
I was.
I was but I was also
Yeah, I I I was homesick. I I always felt when I left Texas I was more magnetically drawn back to it.
Even if
Almost I didn't wanna be and it you know, I just kinda view that as a universal signal.
Um so yeah, I started wearing I had I was wearing boots as a kid, like any good Texan, you know, I probably had some good some red Justin Roper's
And then
in college I started wearing them again towards the end'cause I really just
I was tired of
trying to blend in and I wanted to kinda live more of my true identity and so started wearing
Some boots then and then
And in New York, yeah, I was wearing them.
Yeah, this is twenty fourteen. And this is an idea that comes to you like oh cowboy boots, maybe
there's something to cowboy boots, but you kept moving away from it'cause you felt like it wasn't
A big enough opportunity.
I think I was just judgmental of it'cause I knew what people would say.
And a lot of people would have the reaction honestly that you're having, which is like it feels like a niche thing, it feels like only
Some people wear'em
Yeah.
Actually my aha moment was
Wait, I'm seeing what
The coastal elite, if you will, think about this category. Yeah.
It feels like all the people in New York and LA and SF are
sort of making the decisions around what the media and what the public perception of this category is and
I feel pretty confident that that we can build a big business here.
But you were living in New York, so what got you to sort of say, you know what? Actually I think that consensus is wrong. I think there is an opportunity in boots.
Yeah, first thing was a little bit of data that I had.
I was able to pull up a an old uh I think private equity due diligence report on one of the retailers. A retailer that that does boots.
Uh yeah, they they quoted the US boot cowboy boot industry at three billion or more.
And I don't know what I thought it was, but that was a
I don't know, at least five, if not ten times bigger than I thought it was. Yeah, now you're getting now you're getting closer to casket numbers. Yeah. But you saw that there was an opportunity
there and you thought there's something to this.
It was basically two major realizations. One it's bigger than a bread box.
And then two and this was betting on my own intuition for sure, but it was
There was a brand missing.
The real thing that I noticed was
I don't think there's a brand out there that's set up for this next
10, 20 years of growth. The last brand that was started was started twenty plus years prior.
The brand before that was probably started twenty plus years prior, if not fifty, and then there's got some hundred, hundred fifty year old brands out there. Yeah. And to be clear, there were a lot of other dynamics of the category that were interesting.
It was super behind in marketplace development, very low uh online penetration.
It was very wholesale oriented and not very attuned to the consumer.
The challenge was everything in between
sort of the sub two hundred dollar and greater than five hundred dollar
Yeah, sort of entry point.
It just kinda felt a little dusty and it kind of felt like none of them were created for me.
Yeah.
The thing that is interesting is that this is a time, twenty fourteen, where
There's gonna be an explosion of brands.
that we're going for that mid range, right? The Warby Parker, like, oh, it's not gonna be an L V M H pair of glasses or it's not gonna be lenscrafters, but it's gonna be somewhere in between, sort of
Bordering affluence, but approachable and affordable.
Um away suitcases.
Very similar kind of
you know, going for that middle market. I mean Kate Spade
handbags kinda s really started this in the nineties.
And this is a version of that. You're saying all right, we're we're not gonna be like an L V M H, you know, level
two thousand dollar pair of boots or even a thousand dollars, and we're not gonna be the
the ones you might get at Target or Walmart that are fifty bucks, it's gonna be like
two three hundred dollars. That is
You know, high quality, but
Attainable.
That is where the orientation began as to what
might give this brand a reason to exist, which was
Can I take
everything that I would ever want in the product. And I wanted the the high end product to be clear.
So my goal was really to have it all was to say yes to everything and then use a business model that a lot of these other brands and other categories were using.
to theoretically
charge a price that might be
Lower than the luxury price, if you will. Right. Because the luxury price also had markups built into it. Right.
design and branding, right? That were well beyond I think what you needed to charge. Um but I'm I'm curious, because this is the summer of twenty fourteen.
And
You're thinking about this.
Cowboy boot.
concept, right?
And
You're gonna move to Texas. You're gonna move back to Texas, not to Dallas, but to Austin.
And you probably made pretty good money as a consultant for four years and probably saved
Quite a bit of it.
So how much money did you have just to start out with? I had about a hundred thousand dollars.
Right.
And so with that money
Uh, what was your first move? Like w what did you do?
I made a long checklist of all the things that kinda worked backwards from a launch date.
Which I ended up
Grosly missing by probably six months.
But anyway, sourcing was really the by far the most important thing. Yeah. I eventually found out everything was made in Leon, Mexico. Yeah, how did you find that out, by the way? Just by Googling it? No, I cold called a bunch of custom boot makers. I mean, I found an article that was
print only, but had been archived on a Texas Monthly's website. And it had the names and numbers of
A lot of Texas custom boot makers. I called a lot of those numbers and they the lines were not this was probably a twenty year old fifteen year old article, they were twenty. So the lines were probably no longer in business, or Yeah. Well, unfortunately most of them had passed away. Right. But uh the few that did pick up
You know, all but one of them basically told me to pound sand and what were you asking them? I was very honest with them. I said, Hey, I'm not gonna compete with you
I'm a twenty six year old entrepreneur. I'm starting a cowboy boot brand that's going to sort of disrupt the market. We're gonna sell direct to consumer. We're gonna create really
High quality boots and
It'll be not a custom brand at all.
And do you have any advice for me? Yeah. Do you have any bone in your body that wants to help an earnest young man? And did any of them say yes?
Yeah, one guy did. He wasn't a custom bootmaker.
Uh, he was actually an executive at one of
The boot brands.
That was reasonably big.
And I don't know, he just kinda took a he had a soft spot and you know, he said, I'm gonna do you a favor, there's really only one place to go. It's Leo in Mexico, it's where all the welted
Western boots are made really.
And here's this one guy's name. He'd be my first call, and if he picks up he'd be a great guy to at least
Show you the reps.
Got it.
And how is your Spanish, by the way?
Luckily I was n I was fluent in high school and I I became fluent again in the year after that.
But you had good enough Spanish to kind of at least go down there. So
So he mentions Leon.
So you decide that you're gonna go down there.
And what was your what was the goal?
Did you
You had some appointments?
Line up.
Yeah, so I
had only gotten one name, one email of one factory owner.
And he said, Sure, I'll meet with you on this day.
You can come down.
And that was it.
I created a PowerPoint deck.

Met with him.
I don't think
The deck was opened.
Uh, maybe I flipped to a page and it was kinda like, I don't you just need to talk to me face to face and
You know, I realized later there was no chance that he was gonna work with me. I I look in the factory and
the brands that I really wanted to compete most directly with.
But
Banners on the wall. Yeah. And
By the way, now that factory is
Uh not to ruin the story, but he a few a couple of years later he became
Right.
But you get there and you realize you this is not gonna first of all, imagine that the minimum order wasn't something you could
Fulfill.
You know, we didn't even get there with him. He basically told me
You know.
I like my clients. I've got I think he had clients that were making over a thousand boots a day contractually and it was just
You know, doesn't need to take any risk. He said, but I know a guy across the street.
But I really wanted to work with him. In fact I spent the rest of the fall trying to convince him to work with me until December
Man, it was hard because I kinda thought that
I uh you know, some of it'll work with me, it's no big deal. And it got to the point of where I was sort of desperately needing to work with someone to get something started.
What's not clear to me is if you went down there, right, and if you saw that all of these other brands were already making boots down there.
At that point, didn't you I mean you must have
asked yourself, Well how am I gonna make my thing different? Because
originally you were looking at this as like an opportunity to hit a mid middle market, right? Something that was
high quality
But cheaper than a thousand dollars or six hundred dollars. But if other brands were already making their boots
In these factories.
Surely they were already offering quality boots at a competitive price. So how are you gonna
Differentiate your product.
I mean, listen, the the the D to C myth is that you can
You skip the wholesale markup.
And you can charge a lower price.
Yeah, the reality is
The increase in marketing cost, the increase in G and A that you have to have to
operate both as a retailer and a brand
It's a very costly game and so
I would say that was the plan, which was to basically say we're not gonna wholesale the boots. And so we've got theoretically a little bit more margin to play with.
Right. Oh, a lot of these brands were wholesaling. They were selling at department stores and that's the big business, obviously. It's like Nike, that's their business.
Yeah, mostly selling to independents and big box western.
Yeah. But the other real thing was I really want this boot to be everyone's favorite boot. And I want this brand to be everyone's favorite brand. And so I had already started to make a long list of the things that
you know, we were gonna offer the consumer and so it what ended up coming out was a couple things. One, the product

And there were just a few notable minor improvements we needed to make to make the product
in my opinion, significantly better than the competition. And it all came down to comfort. Most of the high end brands used
Pretty stiff.
leathers and you know what's called the vamp and the counter, yeah, basically the the part that wraps your foot. And I remember asking
the factory owners and the tannery owners like, Hey, why why are people doing this? And they're like, Well in Mexico, you know, people don't like the boots to droop and so they always make'em stiff and so we always tell people to make'em stiff here.
You wanted softer leather.
Yeah, and I was like, Well can we make it softer? They're like, Oh yeah, if you want. Like, all right, well
Let's do that.
And then the second thing was most of the higher end brands that use really
old school construction techniques.
were not comfortable underfoot. They would stick a big
Basically natural, untanned leather, mid sole. And I said, Well, why don't we just
add a little bit of cushion under there as well. And so those are the two innovations.
that differentiated us from all the high end brands. And then the other big thing we did was
And this is where my my sort of north east
experience with other people reacting to this industry came in handy was I kind of felt like the category needed to be demystified a little bit.
Yeah.
The only shopping experience really available at the time for cowboy boots was not only
In a physical retail store there wasn't much online. But your
You're walking down basically that grocery store aisle.
of boots w that are arranged by size and there's
A hundred different kinds of boots that all look different from each other that are
A hundred to a thousand dollars with
Almost no rhyme or reason and it can be overwhelming. You almost feel like you need a
A Sherpa to walk you through it.
And I said, Why don't we simplify this for people?
And
I in my research

Going to these stores and then asking the associate, hey, tell me your best selling high quality boot you have.
Yeah.
And they always pulled something off the shelf.
that it was so refreshing. It was always the simple brown
Beautiful.
sort of understated details, uh high quality leather, no frill. You can you can kinda it felt versatile. It felt like something you could wear with jeans or slacks.
And like, yeah, this is really the one that sells. And then I look at the shelf and I'm like, Well, why?

Why isn't that more obvious and
Can I distill that for the consumer?
Yeah.
All right. I wanna just stick to Leon for for a moment. You you end up having to work with this other factory that's across the street from the one you wanna work with. I'm assuming this other factory's smaller
probably doesn't have the same capacity
When you start to talk to
This factory.
You're not a designer.
w how does it work? Do they have like
Look books where you just like pick
different parts of what you how you want it to look and you put it together.
Well, remember, I uh I wanted Tecovs to be my creative endeavor and so
Right. Uh so yeah, no, I designed the the boots.
I did draw it with my hand, but then it uh then I needed to send an email and I couldn't get a good
picture of what I was drawing and so I went into Microsoft Paint.
And I figured out that
There's a function where you could kinda make a line and then
click to the right and the the line would kind of swoop and turn into a curve. And I basically used that
to try to match my drawing and so yeah the first boots were designed in Microsoft paint.
Let me come back in just a moment, how Paul becomes the client from hell when dealing with his Mexican manufacturer.
And how he chooses a name for his brand that at first
He doesn't even like.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's late 2014, and Paul is trying to place an order with a factory in Leon, Mexico to make his cowboy boots, but he only has$100,000 to work with, so
We negotiated, I tried to get the the minimum order quantity as low as I could. And what was their minimum? How many did you have to order?
Two thousand pairs.
And you were gonna price them at like what was your retail price gonna be? One ninety five to two thirty five.
Got it, okay.
So basically you're looking at
What I mean your your your price It was about a two hundred thousand dollar minimum. Right, you were a hundred grand.
So you were gonna have to 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 gonna have to spend about two hundred grand
On these but uh
And what was the time frame? I mean did you
Again, like at that point did you like put a deposit down and say, Okay, here's the first thirty grand, let's go.
Let's start.
Yeah, at this point so much time at pa 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 dwendling. We get all the way into the summer.
But it got so bad that it actually I got handed off to the factory next door to the one that I had originally worked with because they were busy with their other orders. So 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 yeah, I'm 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 math should work. I should be okay. Okay, we're we're gonna get there in a sec, but Yeah.
You have a plan.
And
By the way, did you have a name yet? Was it called Tacovas?
Already or not yet?
believe we picked the name in December or January.
I had hired a branding agency
That fall. But how much did that cost you?
All in on branding and
inclusive of basic web design. I think I paid
Fifteen or seventeen thousand dollars and that included. Oh, so that's a bargain.
Yeah, I mean I was not going to the New York agencies. No.
So how did you come up with a name Tecovus?'Cause Tecovus I think it's like a geological formation or something. Wha tell me what it is.
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 I had a few names that I wanted to use that weren't available
The Tacovist name came from a brainstorming exercise. We actually found
Th a friend of the agency was a graduate student at Texas I think
majoring in linguistics. I don't even remember. And they kinda 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 to come from something real.
And he basically came up with a list of ten.
And you know, we've been told by the lawyers to pick something relatively obscure and
We kinda 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. You didn't like Tacovas. I wish I had the vision to say I did. And what is it? It is a geological site.
Yeah, it's basically a rock formation within the Paladuro Canyon, which is uh basically only geologists have probably ever even heard of that word. So you could get you could use it.
Yeah, it was basically obscure enough for us to to own. It felt right to me after a while. It kinda the first two letters and the last two letters were the same as Texas.
It felt both masculine and feminine, it kind of felt plural and singular, it kind of
sounds like a Spanish word. I'll think it actually derives from a native American word and so
Yeah, just a a lot of signs pointed toward the name being right.

Alright, so you have a name.
But you're you're blowing through your cash, your savings, right? You had a hundred grand that you brought with you.
But now you needed more money.
You needed more money to pay for
All this stuff, right? All these orders. So
What did you do?
Yeah, the well wasn't gonna run dry until the fall of fifteen, and that was really when all the major operational costs were starting to add up.
Yeah.
And
It became pretty clear
It became blindingly obvious that I was gonna run out of money.
And so I really had this milestone. I wanted to get to launch. I wanted to say I bootstrapped this brand to launch and then I went, you know, and raised capital for it.
So I got comfortable with the idea of raising capital
That year for sure. I mean, every other brand in the universe was rais seed rounds, pre seed rounds.
But you knew you could get through that first year on what you had.
Yeah, I got through the pre launch year. And I did. I got through the pre launch year and basically September
I started running well, here's the other thing, I cashed up my four oh one K, so that was not included in that original number.
You take a big tax penalty on that.
Yeah, but you are in your twenties. I mean it's you know Yeah it's not that risky. I mean it's not the best idea, but it's not
But you can recover from that.
It's not, but man, I I mean I extended every runway I could, even though I like you point out, I yeah, I certainly certainly had the ability to raise capital.
Just I had I don't know, I was prideful. I didn't want to, I wanted to get to a certain point.
I probably took on thirty thousand dollars of credit card debt. I don't think I even er erased for three years. Yeah.
I mean my credit score was in shambles until a few years ago.
And tell me what you were doing on a day to day basis between the time you visit Lyon and when you launch, right, in twenty we're gonna get to how you do this in twenty fifteen, but
Like on a day to day basis, I have to imagine you're working both
Trying to work smart but probably working very long hours. What are you doing every day?
To be honest, I don't think the hours were long because there's
There's just not a lot to do. There's no company that's operating. There's no customer service emails. There's no orders to be placed
It's a lot of hurrying up and waiting and I think I
totally underestimated the product develop the design and product development life cycle and how long that would take.
Why did that take so long? Was it going back and forth with like emails or
Because I had never done it before and I was the most annoying client you could possibly have. Because you get they make a prototype and you're like uh nah, it's not right. Yeah, basically today the way things work is you know you agree to a certain number of prototype reviews, you know, usually two, maybe three
Yeah. And I was a perfectionist too. I mean, we probably went through ten
Mm.
I remember going to them on day one and saying
I am not designing to an FOB cost here, uh a cost here. I'm I am designing
For the end product to be perfect. And then you just tell me how much it costs.
And I'm gonna go price it, you know, the way I need to price it. In other words, they were used to
doing it as cheaply as possible, assuming that the customer was going to then sell it to a wholesale was gonna wholesale it and then the retailer would mark it up again. So they were used to the to the brand saying
It can't be more than eighty dollars because we're gonna multiply that by four and retail for three twenty, three twenty five. And you were basically saying, look, you know, you can spend more money because I'm gonna be sending selling this directly through my website, so if I make a
thirty or forty percent margin on this were you know, were in great shape. But that meant that
they could spend more money on the prototype. And all this stuff. I mean basically it was always gonna be a
Yeah, to work with Tecovis as a client, I wanted to shift the paradigm with these factories. I wanted to s shift away from
Where do we cut corners? Where can we save money on
You know, some small material thing and how do we invest in the quality.
Yeah.
Okay, so you're going back and forth and back and forth, and in the meantime, it's a waiting game. Because y you wanna launch this thing.
And how long does it take to make a prototype, like two weeks?
Yeah, two weeks is a pretty typical cycle. Okay, you look at it, you fly down there.
And you get there and you're like, No, it's not there. Not good enough yet.
Yeah, that happened more times than I can count. And then it happened again because we had to switch the factories kinda last minute.
How were you keeping up your spirits that this was going to work, that people would actually buy them?
What gave you the confidence?
It was a very humbling year, I will say.
I remember my college roommates
kind of asking me for updates and you know, they like, Oh, you quit your job in private equity.
To start a bootstore, you know, how's it going and and
Yeah, I I ate a lot of humble pie. And so I think by setting that baseline all the way down and knowing that no, I'm I'm like
Going all the way to the bottom. I'm going to zero. I'm going to negative
Do you like Drake?
You start from the bottom.
Yeah. Maybe.
Okay, you go to this prestigious university and all your friends are
in finance and or going to business school and and you're like in Austin
Making but trying to make cowboy boots.
Listen, I was talking to a lot of people about going to market and getting ideas for how to launch and
I ended up actually
I believe you've
Have the Harry's guys been on this? Yep.
Yeah, well yeah, friends with with Jeff. With Jeff Rader.
Now I am, but it w didn't know him back then. But I had seen their launch playbook and they had created this
Actually this open source
email gathering tool that I think they had gathered like a hundred thousand emails for before they launched. And so I found the code for it.
And put Takovis on it.
And
Yeah, that that was just one of the many things we did. Unfortunately, unf unlike the hundred thousand emails, I think I got two thousand, but That's not bad.
Yeah, I think I launched with
You know, we launched five thousand emails. But yeah, I was basically just spending that whole six months of the last development time
Grasping at straws, finding every single thing I could put into the bucket of how do I make sure on day one that this thing
I'm not launching to cricket.
Yeah.
And are you already by the summer of twenty fifteen letting people in put in pre orders?
No.
I had this almost
Illogical aversion to pre orders because
I wanted the whole experience of Tecovas to always be
Fast and free and amazing and
And so I didn't want to subject a consumer to uncertainty, which
Yeah, was
Probably stupid for my
Yeah, I mean that's counter in it's like a very
opposite way to how most D to C companies start. They start with pre orders
And there's usually this uncomfortable waiting period and then people get mad, but then it all works out.
But by the way, w did the website look good, by the way, or was it kinda janky?
You know, uh Shopify was
kinda getting off the ground and they had these beautiful templates and
You know, I was very thoughtful about the storytelling. What was the storytelling?
Basically I had a a page about how the boots were made and told the story of Leon. We were really the first brand to kinda tell the story of of Mexico and and Leon in particular. Do you think a lot of brands tried to not talk about Mexico because they didn't want people to know they weren't made in the US?
Hundred percent.
But you flipped that script and you were like, No, actually this is really where they're made. This is a proud heritage
Yeah.
I hired a a really good photographer, videographer to come with me down to Mexico to so
nice lifestyle photography of the boots being made, of the artisans who are making them. I even
Huh.
created a bunch of shirts for them to wear, but we only had like six of them and so we would
You would take'em off the guy who was finished with this step and put it on the guy who was finishing the next step. Oh, you had like shirts made like what kind of shirts? They're little green kinda car harp sort of work shirts. Yeah.
Oh wow, you had the guys in the factory wearing Oh wow, that's so smart. So it looks like a little bit. You know what reminds my my brother in law when he started his business
he called himself account executive. So we're'cause he was young, he was a young guy. So he was the owner, he was the only employee, but he called himself account executive on his business card. So
when he'd show up, people will be like, Oh, you must work for a big company as an account executive. By the way, I made business cards.
I made very nice business cards.
And I remember putting CEO on the business card and my dad I getting giving one to my dad and he just laughed at me. I'm like, Why are you laughing? I am the CEO. He's like, Yeah. You're also the only employee and You're the only employee. Yeah. I actually think it's better to put ex account executive on your business card if you're the Solephon. Anyway
Now you were you launched a website in
the fall, I guess, of twenty fifteen.
And you're so small that you're probably under the radar. Like none of these competitors even noticed you at this point.
Uh yeah, I don't think any of'em Well, it was a very small universe, I will say. It's a industry where everyone kinda knows each other.
I'm sure there was chatter
Yeah, here's the thing, that we were never a part of the conversations that really happened the most, which is between retailer and and brand. We weren't going to the trade shows.
I showed up to one of'em and realized like this is not our place.
We're not gonna be doing this kind of business for a long time. You were not gonna be talking to Neiman Marcus or Bloomingdales. You were gonna focus on selling through your website.
Yeah.
Okay, so
You launch
Officially.
In October of twenty fifteen.
October twenty seventh was the date.
And you were gonna go in with
Two styles, right? Two for men, two for women, that was it.
Yeah, two for men, two for women, two colors each.
The Cartwright and the Earl, I think were the men's, and they're they're still very popular boots that you sell, right?
Yep, still two of our, you know, four best sellers.
And then the women's were the Jamie and the Penny.
Yeah, the Jamie and the Penny, both named after
Dogs that I former pets.
Okay, so you ha and and who
You know, the you launched on the twenty seventh of October twenty fifteen.
And who like did
Was it your friends who were ordering that day?
Yeah, turned it on. Sent.
four or five thousand emails out.
And had twenty thousand dollars of sales in the first day. Uh, so about a hundred, you know, uh eighty to a hundred pairs I forget. So it's pretty good.
How much of that was coming from relatives?
It was about half.
So uh
Not not relatives, but friends and family.
People that I knew directly who were probably a Gmail contact.
And you were paying
rough let's just say roughly half of that to make them, but then you also had to pay shipping costs and so
W roughly like at that time.
They were probably forty percent gross margin.
It's pretty good. Yeah.
I mean it's also speaks to
the perception around cowboy boots, right? It's not like
I don't know, what what's something that people just assume should always be cheap, like
Bottled water, right? Yeah, commodity.
A commodity, right? But cowboy boots, I think people just go into that experience assuming
This is gonna be more expensive.
That was by far the biggest reaction we got from people who were in the industry.
And
In many ways, by the way, being online only kinda worked against us because
I mean boots are a sensory thing, the way they feel feel it. They smell it. Oh my gosh.
You can see the sheen, you can you know, the the details up front, it's what's are hard to photograph.
So I was I became pretty product obsessed.
So much so that actually when when we launched
I actually flew to Mexico. The the production run wasn't done yet. I think I flew there the first weekend of November.
And I stayed there.
Until I inspected every single pair.
I you know personally

I mean it took weeks.
Longer than expected.
How did you keep the the factory owner from just really getting pissed off at you?
Like you'd go there, you were looking at the boots, you're like, nah, this isn't good enough.
Well, I don't think I did.
I think they did get pissed off at me. Yeah.
They're like you're coming down here, you're telling us what to do. You're like twenty six. Who do you think you are?
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 want a business and
I told them that we would sell two thousand 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 I actually I'm on track to sell all two thousand over the four months.
I think
Ultimately, no matter how much I pissed anyone off with
Being an annoying client.

We ultimately won with business.
And doing what we said we were gonna do.
When we come back in just a moment.
Why Paul decides to take a major risk and move from just online sales
It's a brick and mortar as well.
Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this.
Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2015 and just two months after launching the brand to Kova's, Paul has done over$100,000 in sales.
And he's selling his cowboy boots in two ways.
Online?
And out of his car.
I had sold my car and bought a kind of a a a beater, an old you know, an old truck.
Oh that C V
And I would drive that to farmers' markets, I think.
Our second best sales day of twenty fifteen, aside from launch day, was me
Driving to my middle school in Dallas
and selling boots, you know, from a table at the holiday market. In fact my mom came and helped me with the booth. There was my parents were still living in Dallas at the time.
Think we sold.
four thousand dollars, so you know, call it twenty pairs at that thing and so
It was just little by little.
And I really believed in in getting out there in front of customers. I didn't think that sitting in front of my computer and reading
Customer service emails, although that was helpful was gonna really
drive it to the next level. I wanted live interaction and so I
I told myself and and once I hired my first teammate at the end of December I told him to I said This is Brandon Wendell, right?
Yeah, Brandon Window. And who was he who like what was his job?
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 uh money was this uh an angel investor out in DC
Brandon had been working for him. So he actually called me.
And I was I mean I I he didn't know but I was sort of
Desperate for help, and I had already tried to convince a
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 gonna need to learn how to digital market and we're gonna have to learn the the universe of
Of social media. How about you figure that out?
So yeah, we started testing digital marketing very early.
Uh we started working with uh an agency on Facebook advertising
Probably by that January. And did that pay off, the Facebook ads?
Yeah, we were
Man, a co 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 fed uh in
People loved the boots. And so we were able to advertise pretty early and I mean think we were paying ourselves like fifty grand.
So we had you know enough capital to test.
And you know, it turned into a 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 and 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, all right, this is the date that we're
They'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.
make up 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 the mu 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 the eyeballs.
Yeah, basically.
Got two million revenue out of it and
Broke even.
I mean twenty seventeen
You're doing ten million dollars in revenue and you you're profitable.
Yeah. When did y these other boot makers start to notice and and I imagine some of them were probably a little annoyed.
With your approach.
'Cause you're undercutting their prices.
The truth is I don't know when because we never really heard from them.
I do remember a moment
Yeah, so we we did about a little under two million the first year, thirteen the second.
And it was coming into that third full year in business twenty eighteen that we were clearly making a pretty big splash.
And I remember sitting next to one of the other boot executives on a plane to Leon and
Him telling me.
Man, we're we're actually we're starting to feel y'all's business.
And I said, Oh well
Sorry, happy to be in the industry, you know. We're we're still pretty young and
Don't know what we're doing and
And they a they actually said something encouraging. They said, you know, listen, you're doing something right, people are buying it, so
I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was sort of a happy hunting mindset.
Paul.
I mean, by the end of twenty eighteen you do a series A round and you raise a lot of money, thirty million dollars. So
I have to imagine at by this point you have really serious expansion plans. And it's not just gonna be cowboy boots, it's gonna be apparel. It's gonna be
you know, accessories, leather, a belt, other things, uh eventually cowboy hats, all these things that you would eventually do. But it was also gonna be
stores and in I think early spring of twenty nineteen you open your first brick and mortar store. This is I think still your one of your flagship stores in Austin.
on South Congress Street. Um
Now you're you're going from D to C to brick and mortar. There's some crossover here.
But tell me why the store
Why'd that shift?
Two
doing brick and mortar.
was important because this was a time I think a lot of people forget where the narrative was, Brick and Mortar's dead, you know, it's just a waste of money. Um obviously Warby Parker did brick and mortar away.

For some of these brands it worked, for some it didn't.
But what was the thinking behind it when the sort of the the conventional wisdom was like, it's dead. No one's gonna be doing brick and mortar.
Yeah, so I mean I go back to like the original inspiration for a boot and it was the
And 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 they got handed down, whether they got it at the thrift store or their grandfather gave it to them, and I just think
Mm.
I kinda thought, listen, this I feel like we're almost succeeding in spite of our business model, not because of it.
And I wanted a uh this creative outlet. I wanted I had this vision of hospitality for the brand that that went way further than the customer experience associates,'cause
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 kinda considered ourselves a Lululemon of boots. You had to kinda touch it to believe it, feel it to believe it, fit it to believe it. It kinda 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 have any high street, you didn't have any mall, you didn't have any premium outdoor lifestyle centers. So there was this massive marketplace gap to fill as well.
So all right, so you open this sh this store, I've seen lots of photos of it, and it's a beautiful space. I mean it's wood.
wood ceilings and
Really serve.
browns, the colours in there are very even the wood is very leathery looking and
You go in and I guess you ki you get a drink.
you get a b a glass of bourbon or something if you want and and 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
P
I want it to be fun. We were a very f 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 you could say yes to. Like could we have a bar in the store that serve free drinks? Could we, you know, have bootshines 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. Well, you invest
four hundred dollars in a pair of boots you want
We want not you want it to fit right. So okay, we've got boot stretchers in store. Oh, you wanna be able to personalize it's a gift. Okay, we'll be able we'll just say yes to you for that. You wanna bring your old pair in and get it shine, okay, we'll say yes to you for that. It's it's an investment.
And
Yeah, the stores have really allowed us to kinda come full circle.
On delivering that promise.
So
I think by the end of
that year of twenty nineteen, you had opened a total of five stores.
And I think not all of them were in Texas, right? I think there was one in like
One was in Oklahoma. Five stores and
You're growing like crazy. And there's an you know
It takes us to t February of twenty twenty.
raised twenty seven million dollars series B
I mean you're really
coming along here.
March twenty twenty, mar March thirteenth.
you open another store
And then
A couple days later.
The shutdowns begin all over the country.
Oh man. Yeah, that was uh
That was a doozy.
I think by the third week of march.
The run rate.
drops fifty percent.
Yeah.
And I mean fifty percent of a drop in sales.
You have to make some serious
decisions about how you're spending because so much of your business is still
direct to consumer, which means you guys are spending a lot of money on on ads.
You had to basically
Stop that.
Which is gonna have an impact on
On revenue because fewer people are gonna see those ads leading to fewer orders.
Yeah.
It was a uh obviously we had to close the six stores
One of which had just opened, which was such a surreal experience opening that weekend.
You know, with everyone's can't get hand sanitizer. I think I had a box of
Baby wipes in my back pocket, you know, shaking a hundred hands.
Um yeah, but I get a frantic call from an investor that
Saturday or Sunday.
Saying we gotta figure out a
A plan to not go out of business and
Man, then things got really
Bad, honestly. Um
Probably the toughest moment of my life.
Personally.
Yeah, we had to act. We we I I I made a three prong plan.
That was you know, kinda realise hey, this is one of those moments you define
Your career as a CEO when a crisis like this happens.
You know, we had to stem the bleeding.
Uh I did have to reduce the workforce. I think we had seventy
uh employees at the time and
We did a
reduction of force of about twenty. And then we lowered everyone's salary as well.
And then I had to raise it kind of an emergency round that summer.
So that was like the not fun prong. And then the other two prongs were were lean in and the the other two prongs were hug the customer and hug our hug our partners and play offense and so hug the customer was
Let's keep launching our new product. Every other brand in the industry was cutting all innovation, cutting all new launches. But I'm just I'm curious, as your fortunes begin to plummet.
Right.
Um, this is a very scary time for a lot of retailers. Their fortunes would would turn dramatically within a few months, in some cases a few weeks.
But in your case it was different because you're selling
A product that people generally wear
Outside.
Right? This is not athleisure wear or slippers. Like this is something you wear to go out and to be out and about. Like
Business suits.
for example, just dropped, sales dropped, um, formal wear, you know, or sort of going out clothes, designer stuff.
Uh
When did you start to see sales?
pick up because they would pick up.
in twenty twenty.
It didn't pick up until the winter, really.
And you know, we basically Q two and Q three that year
We're all just
Us.
Emailing and keeping live the people who really liked Takovis already. It was just
Staying afloat.
And by the way, the the the reason we it picked up is that th third prong was
play offense and hug our partners. Our partners were our landlords.
And our factories.
And
We didn't cut any orders, you know, we kept making stuff. We had you know, we r we raise money to make sure we could pay for inventory. But what do you think explains it? I mean
your sales drop 50% in that first week.
Yeah.
But then by the end of the year, you're 10 million more in profit than in the previous year. What what explains it?
I think it was us believing in the brand. I mean we bet on the brand to be clear. But what does that mean?
We opened eight stores.
And those stores
By the way, we you know, we were in Texas.
So you could be open. We reopened our store in in April. You're not in California where you couldn't everything was shut until twenty twenty one. I think we literally were closed for three weeks.
You know.
Obviously foot traffic was plummeted. People wearing masks, but people were shopping again. People were in the stores.
Yeah, I think we really uh let's be clear we benefited from being a
Mostly Texas and southern oriented brand. I think the brands that really got the retail spots that really got hit were the North East and the and the West Coast.
Was the experience somewhat different when people were coming in and everyone was wearing a mask? Like all the customer service people probably couldn't serve drinks or you weren't serving drinks or what?
We I think we were still serving drinks, yeah.
You know, people lower their mass to drink the drink, just like on the airplane and
But
You know, you might remember that was a masks became a politically
charged thing. And so that became a hard thing to figure out. We always wore'em
But we kinda stopped dictating
That customers wear them at some point.
I mean that that raises an interesting question, right? Because
You're not Starbucks, right? And Starbucks
for a long time seemed to be appealing to sort of center, left of center consumers, you know, with their
Public.
campaigns and supporting social justice and all these things.
You are a Texan brand.
Right, appealing to not just Texans or Southerners, but
But people who sort of are attracted to kind of Western wear and that lifestyle and not to stereotype, but let's just say that
at least half of them are gonna be m slightly more conservative.
Is it
I mean, we mentioned this idea of masks being kind of a political litmus test, and so I wonder if
you guys kinda had a had a moment in the business and say, look, we have to respond to our customers. Like if they don't want this
If they're not gonna want us to be wearing masks in stores.
We shouldn't.
Yeah.
Listen, politics has always been an interesting question here.
We have remained.
Fiercely
A political.
Right.
You know, I'd I'd say that we're we probably have a surprisingly even demographic spread across the I mean it is remarkable that like Westernware.
You know, which has been around since the 19th century, right? In different versions, like cowboy hats and boots and denim and that whole look, right? You know, the stitched shirts and um you know, it could have become like wearing a durndel, like being a Bavarian in Germany, right? Or like in Austria, right? Like it could have been like this weird thing that you just did dur during Oktoberfest.
But it is a an enduring global phenomenon. Like you go to China today and like people are wearing Wranglers and Levi's, you go to you know Japan, people are wearing cowboy hats. I mean, there's something about Western wear, cowboy hats, cowboy boots, that's just so enduring.
What do you think explains that? One thing I'll say, it is always has been part of the American diaspora of style Western has, as you point out. It's had its ups and downs as well. It's been a trend that's goes it's kind of been a jagged curve up and to the right in terms of
The growth of the cowboy boot industry.
But if you
Drive thirty minutes outside of any city, including
The Bay Area.
Uh in the country, you're probably gonna see more pickup truck advertisements. The radio probably turns to country and
The point is there's a huge base that's always there and always has been there. But I also something feels like it's turned and when people ask me about, you know, hey, the last few years.
It feels like boots are more in trend. Yeah, my first response is, Well, you know, it it it isn't really a new thing. It's always been around. Maybe your friends just started wearing them in Manhattan, perhaps. But I actually am excited because I think it passed a tipping point.
Um I wanna sort of jump a hell of it because
I'm curious about how you and you look back on it,'cause we're gonna talk about in a moment about leaving
the the leadership role.
But
You know, you were a young guy when you started this, twenty five, twenty six, and now you've scaled it, but
What did you think about managing people and being a leader? Did you feel like you were good at it? It's really hard. I mean, some people
are naturally good at it and most people have to learn it.
And usually they're bad at it for a while.
Yeah.
I think I definitely was bad at first.
And I think the whole time
I thought I was bad.
All of the hardest moments of the business come from people, whether or not you made usually it was when you made the wrong hire or you top

It's the lowest lows of
Any day.
And I think I didn't realise how
that I was actually doing a pretty good job most of the time. And so but I beat myself up a lot.
And
That was actually one of the reasons I started looking for leverage in the business.
When you say leverage, you start looking for Yeah, I wanted an executive who can help take
a bunch of the business functions off my hands.
I stopped recruiting for that role during Covid.
Until
Late twenty one when we
had sort of exploded. I mean, we'd gone from I think we did went from eighty to a hundred forty million in revenue.
between twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, and it was so clear that the company was on a good track again post COVID.
So I was like, okay, here's the time to like address my own
My own management uh desires at this point. You wanted to focus on things like branding, creative experience rather than operations and
And and employees and management and things like that. Yeah.
I was passionate about
Product.
About retail and about brand.
And so
It was a hard decision, obviously.
I mean my identity was
has been tied in this business for almost a decade at that point and over a decade now.
I realise I didn't need it for my ego though. I didn't
Yeah.
I didn't need
To be CEO to be happy.
In
June of twenty twenty two.
You bring on David Lafitte.
to be the CEO.
At
to Covas and you transition to become executive chairman.
And at that point you step away from the day to day operations.
So just reflect on that for a moment. I mean
I'm sure on the one hand it was really
it was 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 it in the same way. How did you
Personally.
Cope with that change.
Well, it's been an evolution, and you're right, a lot goes out the door.
It's been a v a sort of an extreme exercise and 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. Hm.
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 uh in these next five years and have been a lot more reflective and grateful, I think, recently, but it took me a while to get there.
Paul, you I and I say this to you speaking as an older guy to a younger guy here.
'Cause I'm about fifteen years older than you.
You what, you're thirty six, th almost thirty seven, I think, right? Yeah, by the time this airs I'll be I turn thirty seven next week. Okay. So but I'm I'm fifty, so c so a little older than you and um you are still a young guy.
You've made some money because you started this brand and and it's successful and you'll probably make more once it you know, if it ever goes public or it's bought out by a somebody else.
Um
I'm sorry, it's a heavy question.
But how do you see sort of
Let's just say the next ten years of your life unfolding.
You know, it's funny, I I've literally spent
This has been my main focus of the last
few weeks and months really has been asking myself these questions
Not to dodge it, but I would say that the question I get the most is what's next. What's next. Yeah.
I I let it pressure me into thinking about a lot of ideas. I thought about starting another company and
I realize that wasn't the right answer right now and that there's two things that are true. One's kind of
logical and one's a little illogical or faith based. The logical thing is
Tecovis is still growing. Tecovis still has a job to do, and I still have a really important job to do as its founder and as its chairman.
But then the other man the other answer to your question is I have no idea.
And
I am just getting comfortable with the idea that I don't know.
And that's okay. And I think
I've never not known. I've never not had the next step and I've
My whole life I had the
The school, the next school, the job, the job, the thing, the thing, the thing, the next year, the next budget
And I don't have that now, and I think that's okay. I'm putting a little trust in the universe, honestly. It's a little woo, woo woo, but
I'm putting a little trust in the universe that
Whatever it is I'm doing right is gonna guide me to
Those next things.
Paul, when you think about the journey you took, right, and like launching this in twenty fifteen, starting in twenty fourteen, but launched in twenty fifteen and then you know
This is gonna do like
What?
in sales this year.
Yeah, we'll we'll definitely exceed three hundred million in net sales this year.
I mean it's amazing.
And you've got how many stores?
We have forty two stores and twenty states.
Um
So when you think about that
You know.
A category that you weren't
initially super
Confident about it.
And word is now.
And you know what you've been able to do.
How much of where you are now do you attribute to the work that you put in, the grind? And how much do you think had to do with just luck that people
It just appealed to people, this brand, this name, this kind of
The zeitgeist around Western Ware.
Guy, as I told you when we first met, I'd been listening to your show for
A decade or so.
So you've answered this question the mirror with a phone, with a brush.
You know, I haven't and I but I did ha I I could tell you what I would I would have said five years ago.
Yeah.
I used to not like this question, honestly.
I used to be you know what? It's not luck. It's all there's no luck. It's all you m y life is what you make it.
But man, I I do have such a greater appreciation now that I've reflected on it, on the circumstances that had to unfold.
For me to be where I was, for me to be born where I was, for me to
Have
had a crisis that I could not have possibly been thankful for that turned me
into the CEO I wanted to be that
God so many moments that I don't think ever would have happened.
that I had no control over and that certainly nothing to do with my skill or will.
So
I think I appreciate a lot more the way the universe unfolds in mysterious ways.
Whatever you want to call that.
That's Paul Hedrick, founder of Tecobas.
By the way, if anyone ever doubted that Westernware is having a moment,
Look no further than Tacova's newest flagship store.
Set to open in the fall of twenty twenty five, right in the heart of Soho.
in New York City. Paul, who came up with the idea for Tacovas when he was still living in New York more than a decade ago,
Calls it.
His full circle moment.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyroz.com or on Substack.
This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ranteen Arab Louis.
It was edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Imon Maani. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes Chris Massini, JC Howard, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening.
to how I built this.