Think of cowboy boots, at least nowadays, and a few brands come to mind: the classics, like Lucchese and Rios of Mercedes, and the newbies, like Tecovas, which was founded in 2014 by Texas-based boot lover Paul Hedrick. He turned his appreciation of the style into a successful direct-to-consumer business fresh off selling its 1,000,000th pair in 2021. Clearly they’re his company’s bread and butter. It made more than $100 million selling them last year, and Tecovas’s ascension shows no sign of plateauing any time soon. They grew more than 80 percent year-over-year, an increase triggered by the brand’s expansion into accessories, apparel, bags and Ranch Wear (what it calls work boots).
Where you could once only find western boots, you can now shop jeans and henleys, pearl snap shirts and wallets, and, now, for the first time, another footwear style: slip-on shoes. The Monterrey is Tecovas’s first attempt at shoes shorter than ankle-height, resulting in a silhouette that’s somewhere between a loafer and a slipper. (Think: Viberg’s Slipper crossed with Astorflex’s Patnoflex.)
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And although they aren’t boots, they do still slip on, making them as easy to take off as they are to put on. They’re also made according to the same standards the boots are, which means each pair is constructed in León, Mexico using a Blake stitch (when the outsole is stitched to the insole using a chain stitch), filled with a padded insole and finished with a hybrid leather-rubber tread. The available variations — Butterscotch Bovine and Honey Suede, materials with drastically different looks but similar durability — both have rounded toes and 1-inch stacked leather heels. For all that, their $165 price tag is pretty fair. Plus, in the future, you can send them back to be resoled, a process that only costs $150 more. Blake stitched shoes can only be resoled so many times, though, because the cobbler will need to draw new holes each time.
CourtesyThe Monterrey (Butterscotch Bovine)
Courtesy