Banking on KC – Zach Lawless of Hyer Boots: Rebooting Heritage While Reviving a Legacy Brand
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Kelly Scanlon:
Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Zach Lawless, the owner of Hyer Boots, a multi-generational company that invented the cowboy boot in Olathe, Kansas in 1875. Welcome, Zach.
Zach Lawless:
Thank you for having me. Excited to be on today.
Kelly Scanlon:
Well, I'm excited to hear the story. Like I said, it goes back to 1875, and certainly the company's had its up and downs and we'll get into some of that, but take us back to 1875, and tell us a little bit about the history of Hyer Boots and what made it such a notable name in the footwear industry from the beginning.
Zach Lawless:
Well, like you said, the beginning goes all the way back to 1875, but our claim to fame is, like you said, we invented the cowboy boot. So if you type in Google who invented the cowboy boot, Hyer Boots will pop up and an angry-looking German guy will pop up as well too. That angry-looking German guy happens to be my great-great-grandfather, a guy by the name of C.H. Hyer. C.H. Hyer is famous obviously for inventing the cowboy boot, but by all accounts, he is a really good example of the American dream. So he was the son of a fifth-generation shoemaker and a German immigrant in the United States and took a job working on the railroad that brought him over into Kansas City. He was kind of a poor man by really any account at that point in time.
The story within my family says that he just didn't like the working conditions on the railroad, so he ended up taking a job at the School of the Deaf in Olathe, Kansas, which is still there today, and was teaching shoe and last making at the School of the Deaf, and that was kind of what brought him to Olathe, Kansas. That was right during the long haul cattle days and everybody was bringing the cattle into Kansas City from all the way from Texas, Colorado, kind of, you name it. My great-great-grandfather actually opened up a shop right along the trail as a way for the students to make a little bit of extra income using the craft that he was teaching.
The story goes that a cowboy came into the store one day on the long haul cattle drive and said, "I don't care what it costs, make me the best pair of boots you can for the job." And my great-great-grandfather put a pointed toe, a raised heel, and a scalp top on a pair of boots and sold him the pair of boots and started reselling that boot, calling it a cowboy boot.
Kelly Scanlon:
Wow. Who would've thought?
Zach Lawless:
Right? So a lot of people think, or I'm always asked, "How do we make a claim that we invented the cowboy boots?" It's really putting those three things together in one boot and then marketing it as a cowboy boot, which by today's standards doesn't sound like a crazy thing, but this was 15 years after the invention of the right and left foot shoe, so it was a-
Kelly Scanlon:
Oh really?
Zach Lawless:
... Pretty crazy thing by the standards of the day.
Kelly Scanlon:
There weren't any differences between the what foot you put a shoe on before?
Zach Lawless:
There wasn't. So have you ever heard the term stand in a bucket of water?
Kelly Scanlon:
Uh-hm.
Zach Lawless:
So that actually comes from back in the day when both shoes were the same. So you'd either have a square toe or a round toe where they weren't identified by which foot. You just stand in a bucket of water until your boots were sopping wet and then you'd get out and wear them around until they were dry, and that's how they would conform to either your right or left foot.
Kelly Scanlon:
So he invents the boot, and I guess it becomes wildly popular?
Zach Lawless:
Yeah, no, I always say that that's actually the invention that he's really known for, but he was just a great businessman all around, very innovative. So that made him famous, but really what brought him to being one of the biggest brands in the United States at that time was he adopted the mail-order catalog for footwear from England. So he was, by all accounts that we can see, the first mail-order catalog for shoes in the United States. So back in the day, there weren't size 6s or size 7s, but what's called factory sizing. You would actually have to go into your local cobbler, they would measure your foot, they'd make a form of your foot called a last, and then they'd put that last on a shelf and anytime you needed a boot, you'd just go in and they'd make a boot for you.
But that meant that all of your cobblers were local cobblers and things of that nature. What he allowed you to do was trace your foot on a piece of paper, send it in through the mail, and they would make you a pair of boots. So that allowed him to become a nationwide, even global cobbler, really one of the first ones to ever do it. And we were the largest footwear manufacturer west of the Mississippi, largest boot manufacturer in the United States in the 1890s, all the way to the 1920s, 1930s.
Kelly Scanlon:
So did he sell other types of shoes too, other types of footwear?
Zach Lawless:
He did. Throughout the days of Hyer Boots, we sold Western footwear or cowboy boots and things of that nature all the way to packer boots. We were the largest supplier of equestrian footwear into World War I. And then we also did, there's some fun stuff once you get into the '70s or '80s when it transitioned into the next generation of the family, we made golf shoes. I don't think those did too well. We had roller blades at one point, so I found some really crazy stuff in the archives, but...
Kelly Scanlon:
Well, speaking of that multi-generational transition, so your great-great-grandfather founded this company and then it survived several generations. And then take us up to some of the key points in its history through those different generations.
Zach Lawless:
It has a really storied history in the West. As we were saying, we were the largest footwear manufacturer in the United States in that period of time, so kind of the glory days or the golden days of cowboy, and we were the biggest name. So when people think about the brands that started the western footwear industry, they often think of Justin, Tony Lama, Lucchese, and Nocona, but Hyer is often forgotten in that because we've been out of business for so long, but we were the largest of all of them. Teddy Roosevelt cowboyed in the Badlands in Hyer Boots. Calvin Coolidge dedicated Mount Rushmore in Hyer Boots all the way to Marilyn Monroe, who wore Hyer Boots in The Misfits, to Larry Mahan who rodeoed in them, [inaudible 00:05:05]. So we kind of have a very, very storied history within Western or even just kind of celebrity culture in the United States.
C.H. Hyer was the founder of the company until about the 1920s when he passed away, and then his son, C.A. Hyer, Charles Albert Hyer took over the boot company and then he ran that all the way into the late '60s, and then the boot company ran into some hard times and my family ended up losing the boot company in 1971. C.A. sold the company actually to my grandfather. So my grandfather was the last CEO before we lost the boot company. So when we lost it and the bank took over, it put my grandfather and my grandparents in a tough situation as well too. So in '71, my family lost the boot company.
Kelly Scanlon:
But the brand itself did not disappear. I believe it had different iterations before you came back on the scene.
Zach Lawless:
Correct. So in 1971, my family lost it. The bank actually took over and ran the business for a number of years in receivership until about '78 and then in '78, they sold to a boot company out of Texas, which ended up selling to Tony Lama. Somewhere in the '80s, Tony Lama stopped producing Hyer boots, so that was kind of the Hyer Boots brand disappeared, we believe, around 1985 is about the year.
Kelly Scanlon:
How did you get back involved? It doesn't sound like bringing it back after being off the market since 1985 would've been an easy thing to do. How did you bring it back? What inspired it and why do you want to continue its legacy?
Zach Lawless:
Like I said, my grandfather was the last CEO of the company and lost on some pretty hard times, so we didn't talk about it growing up. People don't really even fully believe it, but I didn't really know anything about it growing up.
Kelly Scanlon:
Really?
Zach Lawless:
Yeah. I always joke, I'm like my grandmother would make comments at Thanksgiving, "We invented the cowboy boot" and everybody would be like, "Yeah, sure, grandma, and Dad invented the internet."
Kelly Scanlon:
[inaudible 00:06:46].
Zach Lawless:
Yeah, right? No one took her too seriously, but it was kind of something we didn't really talk about. I think it was a sore subject for my grandfather. And then about five years ago, my grandfather actually passed away and we were going through, moved my grandmother into a retirement home, going through the basement, and I uncovered really like two boxes that was all the leftover stuff from the boot company. In fact, on top of that box was actually a picture of Calvin Coolidge dedicating Mount Rushmore in a pair of Hyer boots. So I obviously, at this point, all I really knew was there's an order form with Calvin Coolidge's picture on it saying, "Thank you so much for rushing these boots," and it has the Hyer name on it, which I knew was my grandmother's maiden name.
So I took it upstairs and started talking to my grandmother about it, and she lit up. She acted as if she'd been waiting 50 years for somebody to ask her about Hyer Boots 'cause even though my grandfather was the last CEO, it was her side of the family. So she grew up in the boot company, she had all these nostalgic memories and she was so excited to start talking about it that we stayed up into the evening, probably 10:30, 11 o'clock, which doesn't sound crazy, but she's in her mid-nineties. So that was a pretty late evening, yeah.
So we stayed up talking about it, and when I left, I looked at my fiancée, my wife now, and said, "You know what would be really cool is if we could get that trademark back into the family as a gift for grandma," and this was about Thanksgiving time at the time, and I thought I was going to get it back by Christmas was the goal and give it to her as a Christmas gift.
Kelly Scanlon:
So a month, yeah a month?
Zach Lawless:
Yeah, a month or two.
Kelly Scanlon:
That's plenty of time, right?
Zach Lawless:
Right? But then I went home and I actually tracked that trademark down to Berkshire-Hathaway, much bigger entity than I thought would own that, but at the time, I thought it would be a fun narrative. I thought they might even enjoy it, giving it back to my grandmother. So I called them up and got a hold of the right person after a few calls and told them the story, and they weren't interested in giving the trademark back. I didn't really have much of a plan or an idea, but I just decided I'm going to start calling them and bugging them until I get them to give me an opportunity to get the trademark back. So I ended up calling them every Wednesday at 11:00 AM for almost 18 months-
Kelly Scanlon:
Wow.
Zach Lawless:
... Until I bugged them enough that they decided to drop the trademark and give me the opportunity to relaunch Hyer Boots.
Kelly Scanlon:
So that's like 75 times you've called them, something like that.
Zach Lawless:
Yeah. You've done the math better than I have, probably.
Kelly Scanlon:
Probably for 18 months.
Zach Lawless:
Yeah, it was a long time. At one point, I was just calling and I was like, "Why am I doing this?"
Kelly Scanlon:
So they picked up the phone, they continued to pick up the phone.
Zach Lawless:
Good question 'cause nobody really asked that part of the story. I think that everyone assumes they did. No, they stopped picking up the phone. So really what I was doing was I was dedicating an hour of my time every Wednesday at 11:00 AM trying to just get a hold of somebody at Berkshire-Hathaway who could help me get to the right people.
Kelly Scanlon:
So once you found the right person, what won them over?
Zach Lawless:
The first person that became a champion for me in that whole thing was a historian at the company. But the funny thing was I was only calling on Wednesdays, this person only worked Tuesday and Thursday. So we played phone tag for three months before I got a hold of them.
Kelly Scanlon:
They always say entrepreneurship is as much about being persistent as it is for anything else, and your story proves that. Did you ever feel like it wasn't going to happen and like, "Nah, I've got other things to do today. I'm not going to do it."
Zach Lawless:
Yeah. I always tell people all the time, if you want to start a business, if you want to do anything, persistence is key. Just starting, just getting going at something and then not giving up because that's how you learn, that's how you get better. And people thought I was crazy. I was calling every Wednesday, and they're like, "What are you going to even do if you get it back? Why are you doing this? What are you spending all this time on?"
Kelly Scanlon:
'Cause I assume you had a full-time job as you were going through this.
Zach Lawless:
I had another business at the time.
Kelly Scanlon:
Okay.
Zach Lawless:
Yeah, so that's what I'm saying. At this point, it was really just to get a gift back for my grandmother, and then there was just something interesting about it. There's this piece of my family history. What is it that drives people to put together the genealogy maps and things like that? There's something there that I think drove me to do it a little bit of it. But yeah, there wasn't a huge game plan. I felt like we needed to get back into the family for some reason, and it was kind a fun thing to do on Wednesdays.
Kelly Scanlon:
So how did your grandmother react? Did you keep it quiet during that whole 18 months?
Zach Lawless:
Yes, we did keep it quiet.
Kelly Scanlon:
So when you finally get it and you tell her about it, how did she react?
Zach Lawless:
Oh, it's good. We have a video of it, but we went and told her that we got the trademark back. At this point, we decided we were going to relaunch the boot company. So by the time I got it back, I realized a few things. One was that you can't just take a trademark, you have to actually produce something with that trademark.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes, that's right. That's right.
Zach Lawless:
That was kind of the reason where I was like, "Okay, we have to start a business now if we want the trademark." All of this 18 months of calling doesn't mean anything unless I sell a product with a Hyer logo on it. And so we were like, "Okay, we'll restart the company." And I went to go tell my grandmother, "We got the trademark back, we're relaunching Hyer Boots," she started to cry.
Kelly Scanlon:
Of course, yeah.
Zach Lawless:
And then her first thing she said back was, "Well, you'll never find anyone who can do 12 rows of stitching by hand like they used to."
Kelly Scanlon:
You had a niche and you had a reputation for high quality. So you had marketing challenges, you had challenges like your grandmother said, manufacturing quality probably. What were those challenges? How'd you overcome them?
Zach Lawless:
The reality of being a CEO is that you're working on the most difficult and challenging parts of a business at every stage of it. So it's not always fun. You have to really like tie it to fun. You have to enjoy going through the struggle of every aspect of it. So the challenge is, I say, change really, I don't know if it's month-to-month, but they constantly evolve in the business, from getting the trademark back to then raising capital to start the business to figuring out your manufacturing to getting in sales to figuring out production. The challenges always kind of evolve. Some of them are more particularly challenging than others.
I would say that last year in August or September, there was a particularly challenging moment where we'd outsold our sales forecast, so that was good. We were excited about that, but we knew that that was going to create some issues on the production side of not scaling up. And then we started to hit some delays in the factory. So we were supposed to launch in May and then have all of our product into the market by August. So we have cancellation dates with the retailers starting in August, September time, and we're now late on production. So we have to scale the factory up all the way to get us to where we want to go. And in order to do this, we know this is going to cause cash crunch.
To make matters worse, we go down to the warehouse and 30% of the product that we got shipped in had defects in it. So we have to ship that all back to get it fixed. It means we're now even further delayed. And I remember I told my fiancée at the time, I was like, "This has been fun, but I don't see how we make it to December." That was probably the most challenging moment in the entire business so far.
Kelly Scanlon:
What turned you around?
Zach Lawless:
You put a plan in place and you have to go after it. And so we knew we needed an inventory loan and we knew we needed to ship by October. So I was like, "You guys are in charge of making sure that we get quality control in place and you get everything going and get it shipped out." And I took the other half of the team, our finance side of things and said, "We're getting an inventory loan and an AR loan." So I put all my time in getting that inventory loan and just basically had to trust that the rest of the team would be able to get the quality control issues figured out and get the production figured out on the back end of it.
Kelly Scanlon:
You had a plan to reintroduce the boot to the market and you were working with a Rodeo Association. Tell us about that relationship.
Zach Lawless:
Yeah, this is probably one of the best moments. There's a few times where you get to look back at things and really have a moment of appreciation to reflect on everything that happened, and this was definitely one of them. But one of the really great things that happened with us is that we got to be the official boot of High School Rodeo, which is a massive, I think it's the best sponsorship in probably the western industry, and it's been a huge one for us. But anyway, so the goal was that we were going to launch our product at High School Rodeo after everything got delayed. This was the focus and so that became the rallying cry, launching it at National High School Rodeo in July.
We got some product in, we got that over to the rodeo. We were supposed to get there the day before it opened, help everything get set up and then be there when we launched, but my flight got delayed, so I wasn't going to get in there until midday the next day. And so right when I'm getting ready to take off, the team that's on the ground there starts sending me pictures. There was a line waiting for the booth to open up, and the guy that bought the first pair of boots had been a big Hyer fan back in the day. He wasn't even going to High School Rodeo. He heard that we were going to be selling there and drove 45-50 minutes out of his way to come be one of the first ones to buy Hyer Boots since it relaunched. So yeah, there was a pretty good line. It was awesome.
They sent us the pictures of people buying the boots, and it was kind of two moments. It was everything that you've been working hard to get done and all of the things that you have been putting in place, coming together in that sense of accomplishment and the fact that people were buying boots. So it was a mixture of both. You have this anxiety of are people going to buy the product and then kind of this moment of like, "Wow, everything we did is kind of culminating in this one place."
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah, what great validation to have such a long line, and especially that story about the guy who drove to make sure that he got one of the first pair and he got the first pair.
Zach Lawless:
Yeah, he did.
Kelly Scanlon:
It sounds like, yeah. That is so great. You talk about the connection with the High School Rodeo. You also have a really cool connection with the American Royal. Talk to us about that relationship. They have deep roots here in the Kansas City community, like Hyer Boots. So talk to us about that relationship. How did it come about and why is it so significant?
Zach Lawless:
Relaunching Hyer Boots, there's two communities that I wanted to build a really authentic connection with. One was obviously just the western world, western lifestyle, and then the second one was Kansas City, just because this has been such a big part of my life, it's obviously such a big part of the Hyer Boot story. And if you're going to try to do both those things, there's no better organization than the American Royal.
The opportunity arose just recently to be able to produce the boot for the 125th anniversary of the American Royal. And so that's given me an opportunity to work more closely with the organization, get to know different people that are involved, and then also to build something that's a part of a really special anniversary for them. So we just finalized the design, started selling the boot last week. So at the American Royal Rodeo last week was the first time people were able to buy the new 125th anniversary boot by Hyer Boots.
Kelly Scanlon:
You mentioned earlier that you had another company that you were running when you decided to get the trademark back for Hyer Boots. That was a grab-and-go company that took a hit during COVID. You had to pivot to salvage it and get it turned around, but even before that, you were working in finance in New York City, the financial capital of the USA. What did you draw on from those in order to re-establish the Hyer Boot brand?
Zach Lawless:
All the different experiences that I had, which was admittedly not much, I was 30 when I started Hyer Boots, all played a huge part in me being able to bring back Hyer Boots. So I would say that the private equity, venture capital experience, more so than anything really exposed me to the fundraising process, how to raise capital and how to structure a business. It gave me kind of the framework of how to do it. And it's funny, I thought the framework was probably more valuable than it actually turned out to be. So much of venture capital side of things, you learn how everything's structured, you see all these businesses, but you don't really learn how to build a business. You get a very weird viewpoint when you see hundreds of deals come through, but you're not one person trying to go to hundreds of different people, right? So being the one who says no is a lot different than being the one who gets told no.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah, the other side of the table is a lot different.
Zach Lawless:
A hundred percent. And you see some founders aren't able to deal with that kind of constant rejection that goes into fundraising, but that's the name of the game. It's about getting as many at-bats as you can. And then on the other side of it, the first business I ran, and you're constantly learning and evolving, but there's so many different things that I learned from that business, from hiring a team. I think that was probably the main thing I learned from that business is that it's so much more about people than it is necessarily about even strategy or market or things like that. Getting the right people involved is so crucial and can help guide strategy and everything else involved. And a huge part of being a CEO is being able to not only get the resources that you need for your company from a capital perspective, but getting the resources you need from the right people involved.
And I think that was one of the things I learned and the first one was like, "Oh, we'll have a great strategy. We'll hire people quickly. It doesn't matter if we can't get great people, we'll train them." But that's really hard to do, especially when you don't know what you're doing a hundred percent. So I think that was probably one of the biggest learnings I had from that first business.
Kelly Scanlon:
Back to Hyer Boots. We all know that the footwear industry is very, very competitive and it continues to evolve. So how is Hyer Boots positioning itself to stand out in today's market?
Zach Lawless:
Boots and footwear are a highly competitive market. I think that one of the things we're doing different than other brands in the space is we're building a brand, not just selling a product. I think that there's a lot of product marketing in the space as opposed to brand marketing. So we're really telling a story, we're building our product around the story. We're trying to have a really authentic and genuine connection to the consumer. From a brand perspective, there's a lot that we're doing differently. On a product perspective, we're really focusing on quality, durability, and comfort specifically. I think those are some of the things that we can do really well. So what we're really focusing on is building a product that lasts, and it's been really rewarding on the product side of things to see so many people comment on there that this is the most durable, comfortable boot that they've ever worn and that's been from the day one our focus on what we're trying to build.
Kelly Scanlon:
For our listeners who are aspiring entrepreneurs, what advice would you give them about either reviving a business, like you did, or starting a traditional business? Footwear is a traditional business, but in a modern context, in the modern economy that we live in, it's changing so much all the time.
Zach Lawless:
It is changing. And I think that my advice for anyone, 'cause I do have a lot of friends that reach out and ask me about starting a business, and my advice is just start 'cause a lot of people have a bunch of reasons for why they can't do it now or what they're not doing. And the thing is, you can't be afraid of failing. And then, you also have to be not worried about criticism. You have to be able to pick a direction and go that direction and just start and not worry what everyone else is going to tell you 'cause for every person that's there supporting, there'll be another person who's like, "Why are you doing that? That's a crazy idea."
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah, a naysayer. Sure.
Zach Lawless:
Yeah. So that's what I always tell people. You just have to start, no matter what it is. If you're relaunching a business or you're starting your own business, start 'cause you're not going to even know the things you don't know until you get involved.
Kelly Scanlon:
Very true. So when you look ahead, what are your long-term goals for Hyer Boots? Are you going to be planning to explore new markets, new product lines? What are your thoughts on that?
Zach Lawless:
My goal is to make Hyer a full footwear solution for the western lifestyle, so not just from kind of what we have right now is called our horseman product, but all the way over towards more ranch-style product or more casual product, things of that nature. But to have a full footwear solution for the western lifestyle, to build a really deep connection with our communities and the western culture, and then also in the Kansas City community, those two things. And I think the Hyer Boots can be much more and can expand into other categories some day like denim or apparel or things of that nature. But to start, we want to be the full footwear solution for the western lifestyle.
Kelly Scanlon:
Well, Zach, we wish you the best of luck. What a wonderful thing you've been able to accomplish just getting the trademark back and getting the brand re-established, and you've got production lines going now, how exciting for you. Good luck with your 125th anniversary product with the American Royal. We just really appreciate you being on the show today to tell the story.
Zach Lawless:
Thanks so much for having me on. Appreciate it.
Joe Close:
This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Zach Lawless for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC, a German immigrant's invention of the iconic cowboy boot in Olathe, Kansas in 1875 and the rise, fall and subsequent revival of the multi-generational family business under Zach's leadership is a remarkable story, one that's punctuated by innovation, determination, and resilience. The century-and-a-half journey of Hyer Boots exemplifies true entrepreneurial spirit and the American dream. Just as Hyer Boots is dedicated to crafting boots that equip individuals to explore new frontiers, Country Club Bank supports the dreams and ambitions of local entrepreneurs.
Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on you, Kansas City. Country Club Bank, Member FDIC.