YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Hedrick

lines on the record: 86
first: 2025-05-19
most recent: 2025-05-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 am. I'm obviously going to run out of money. But if I launched 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 rough mass should work. I should be okay.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at this point, so much time. 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 dwindling. We get all the way into the summer. But it got so bad that 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. I'm on factory number three.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, remember, I wanted Takov to be my creative endeavor. And so. So, yeah, no, I designed the boots. I did draw it with my hand, but 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 was a function where you could kind of make a line and then click to the right and the line would kind of swoop and turn into a curve. Right. I basically used that to try to match my drawing. And so, yeah, the first boots were designed in Microsoft Paint.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they always pulled something off the shelf that it was so refreshing. It was always this simple brown, beautiful, sort of understated details, high quality leather, no frill. You can kind of, it felt versatile. It felt like something you could wear with jeans or slacks. And like, yo, this is really the one that sells. And then I look at the shelf. I'm like, well, why? Why isn't that more obvious? Can I distill that for the consumer?”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know 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 you're walking down basically a grocery store aisle of boots that are arranged by size. And there's a hundred different kinds of boots that all look different from each other that are $100 to $1,000 with almost no rhyme or reason and it can be overwhelming. You almost feel like you need a Sherpa to walk you through it. And I said, why don't we simplify this for people? And I, in my research was effectively going to these stores and then asking the associate, hey, tell me your best-selling high quality boot you have.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 midsole. 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 sort of northeast. 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.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember asking the factory owners and the tannery owners, like, hey, 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 them stiff. And so we always tell people to make him stiff here.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, every brand is also show Yeah, mostly selling to independents and big box Western 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 we were going to offer the consumer. And so what ended up coming out was a couple things. One, the product was going to be better. 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 what's called the vamp and the counter, basically the part that wraps your foot.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, the D2C myth is that you can skip the wholesale markup and you can charge a lower price. The reality is the increase in marketing cost, the increase in G&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 going to wholesale the boots. And so we've got theoretically a little bit more margin to play with.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 $1,000 a day contractually. And it was just, you know, doesn't need to take any risks. 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 kind of thought that someone will work with me. It's no big deal. And it got to the point where I was sort of desperately needing to work with someone to get something started.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 if you can come down. And that was it. I created a PowerPoint deck, met with him. I don't think the deck was opened. Maybe I flipped to a page and it was kind of like, I don't, you just need to talk to me face to face. You know, I realized later there was no chance that he was going to work with me. I look in the factory and the brands that I really wanted to compete most directly with had banners on the wall. And by the way, now that factory is not to ruin the story, but a couple years later, he became our primary factory.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one guy did. He wasn't a custom bootmaker. He was actually an executive at one of the boot brands that was reasonably big. And I don't know. He just kind of took a, he had a soft spot and he said, I'm going to do you a favor. There's really only one place to go. It's Leon, 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 ropes.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very honest with them. I said, hey, I'm not going to compete with you. I'm a 26 year old entrepreneur. I'm starting a Cowboy boot brand that's going to sort of disrupt the market. We're going to sell direct to consumer. We're going to create really high quality boots. And it'll be not a custom brand at all. And do you have any advice for me”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, unfortunately, I think most of them have passed away, but the few that did pick up. You know, all but one of them basically told me to pound sand. And”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I cold called a bunch of custom bootmakers. Man, 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 bootmakers. I called a lot of those numbers and the lines were not. And this was probably a 20 year old, a 15-year-old article. They were 20.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made a long checklist of all the things. I kind of worked backwards from a launch date, which I ended up grossly missing by probably six months. But anyway, sourcing was really by far the most important thing. Yeah. I eventually found out everything was made in Leo in Mexico.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The challenge was everything in between sort of the sub $200 and greater than $500 sort of entry point, it just kind of felt a little dusty and it kind of felt like none of them were created for me.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 20 plus years prior. The brand before that was probably started 20 plus years prior, if not 50. And then there's got some 100, 150-year-old brands out there. And to be clear, there were a lot of other dynamics with the category that were interesting. It was super behind in marketplace development, very low online penetration. It was very wholesale oriented and not very attuned to the consumer.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they quoted the US boot cowboy boot industry at 3 billion or more. And I don't know what I thought it was, but that was, I don't know, at least five, if not 10 times bigger than I thought it was.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, first thing was a little bit of data that I had. I was able to pull up an old, I think, private equity due diligence report on one of the retailers.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I was just judgmental of it because 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 them. Actually, my aha moment was wait, I'm seeing what the coastal elite, if you will, think about this category. 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 we can build a big business here.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, I was homesick. I always felt when I left Texas, I was more magnetically drawn back to it, even if almost I didn't want to be. And I just kind of viewed that as a universal signal. So, yeah, I started wearing, I was wearing boots as a kid, like any good Texan. You know, I probably had some good red Justin Ropers. And then in college, I started wearing them again towards the end because I really just... I was tired of trying to blend in and I wanted to kind of live more of my true identity. And so started wearing some boots then. And then in a New York, yeah, I was wearing them.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, here's the thing about coffins, too. It's a secularly declining industry now that everyone's getting cremated. So it wouldn't have been necessarily a growth category.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's funny. You're right that it turns out at the time the death industry was about $16 billion, I believe coffins were over a third of that.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically I had realized that there was one public company that controlled the vast majority of both the production and the sale of coffins. And it was through this crazy funeral home network. Anyway, Cowboy Boots was actually the first idea I had. Almost the entire process between like March and July, I was almost trying to convince myself not to do it 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 going to be perceived as a niche category. I kept thinking of reasons not to do it.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I went down the rabbit hole 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 kind of put my consulting hat on and I thought about idea archetypes. I kind of had a Warby Parker for X, Airbnb for X, and then a few other more esoteric ideas. And Airbnb for storage, for example. Actually, the one that I got very close to doing was coffins.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like a CPG brand And I was always comparing myself to my colleagues at McKinsey and Caterton. 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 my decision ultimately became one about, hey, if I'm starting a company, first of all, I can be creative. Basically every decision could be a creative one.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically, I went to a happy hour with one of my colleagues at Caterton. And man, I think we just had just enough beer to start to talk about, I think we asked a pretty naive question, which is, you know, how hard could it be? To start one of these companies”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really stung. I hadn't even thought about a backup plan, and I kind of believed, I had read somewhere about burning the bridges, and I think I knew 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 kind of homeless. And that was sort of a forcing mechanism to start to think about what was next.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 going to be good enough to get me in. 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.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, guy, it's a lot of sugar, and I don't really eat sugar anymore, so it's kind of funny that that's where I cut my teeth in many ways.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically for about 18 out of my next 24 months, I kind of became sort of a chief of staff and I sat at a desk at a candy company.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for context, I don't know how to put this, but when I was a kid, I felt like I was destined to be in consumer. I love stuff. I loved cars. I liked gadgets. I subscribed to architectural digest and rodent track and popular science. I was always interested in, I mean, listen, I think I was interested in consumerism and didn't know how to put it. And so basically I got a call, a recruiting call to work at this firm, which at the time was still, I mean, it had been around for a long time since 1989, I believe, but only in recent years had established its reputation as really like. And I was sent to Chicago, where we had just made the firm's largest investment at the time. We had merged two candy businesses and we had to do a lot of post-merger work.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like almost a responsibility that comes with being a Texan, of representing it, of being proud of it, of being friendly. It's one of the most recognizable state outlines, you know, one of the most recognizable shapes in the world. It sort of just kind of comes with a 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 kind of time to decide about college and whatnot. And so, but yeah, I was always very proud of where I was from. you know, became a proud Dallas site, was a big Dallas sports fan growing up. And it was nice having a sense of place.”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I became pretty product obsessed, so much so that actually when we launched, I actually flew to Mexico. 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 personally, did everyone and was rejecting a lot and was, I mean, it took weeks longer than expected. I stayed in Leon and...”
2025-05-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tecovas: Paul Hedrick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT