Paul: I'm Paul Hedrick, I'm the Founder and CEO of Tecovas.
We make and sell the highest quality and most comfortable western boots, apparel, and accessories on the planet. Tecovas was really started because I had a personal problem. I wanted to find boots. I’m a Texan. I was living in New York, and there simply wasn’t a great way to buy them here. Went back to Texas to get them, and it was a uncomfortable experience and I felt a brand was missing in the category. I was excited to jump in and get my fingers in the dirt.
Tecovas is part of the Western category, which is probably a lot bigger than most people realize. About 3 or 4 billion dollars of cowboy boots are sold in the US every year, for instance.
But the modern consumer is a lot more demanding of retailers than they used to be. They want the highest quality service, they want direct to consumer value, and this was a category that there hadn’t been a new brand in 20 or 30 years. So that's where Tecovas came in.
So, I'm really happy to be working with our JPMorgan Chase team. They seem to have adopted what I would call a start-up mindset. We have a team that probably started working with us earlier than they maybe traditionally would. We’re a high-growth business, so we don’t have the stability and maybe the know-how that a lot of the more established businesses that they’d normally work with have. But they’ve been extraordinarily flexible and adaptive to change and we really enjoyed that.
I think Tecovas resonates in today's economic landscape because all we’re really doing is focusing on what matters to the consumer in the simplest form. We make really good stuff. We promise to make it as well as we can.
I think everyone appreciates transparency from a business, which is what we’ll always offer. So, I hope that resonates now and maybe forever.
