With its dusty terrain and renegade reputation, Texas has figured big in so many movies that it’s nearly a character unto itself. There are classic Westerns (Giant), neo-Westerns (No Country for Old Men), dramas (Dallas Buyers Club), and a herd of others forever branded to Texas by title alone: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The King of Texas, Murder in Texas, and, simply, Texas.
Entering the fray is Love Letter to Texas, a short film from director Jeff Nichols, best known for 2012’s Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey. Love Letter to Texas is full of things you’d expect—horses, sagebrush, lonely motel rooms—and one thing you might not: an upstart brand that quietly bankrolled the whole thing.
Tecovas, the decade-old outfitter best known for its pearl-snap shirts and goatskin boots, underwrote the 14-minute work. And while there’s no shortage of Tecovas apparel in the frame, it’s inaccurate to call the film a commercial—or even marketing, at least in the traditional sense.
“We did not set out to create a campaign. We wanted to put more of a cultural stake in the ground,” Tecovas vp of brand marketing Samantha Fodrowski told ADWEEK. “We want to evolve as a brand that shows up with a genuine point of view when it comes to art and culture.”
Laying claim to art and culture is ambitious stuff, given that Tecovas is a newcomer to a category where boot-makers like Tony Lama and Lucchese have legacies that date to 1911 and 1883, respectively. Even so, the brand founded in 2015 by entrepreneur Paul Hedrick (a Harvard MBA who grew tired of private equity life) has been on a gallop.
Fueled by a 2022 Series C funding round worth $56 million, Tecovas has been building stores around the country. (Its 4,500-square-foot Manhattan flagship, opened last summer, was its 50th.) Earlier this year, the brand truly rode with the cowboys by advertising in the Super Bowl.
That effort, titled “True West,” was the in-house work of creative VP Scott Ballew, a musician and documentary filmmaker who created cinematic shorts for Yeti before joining Tecovas in October 2024. Ballew is happy to leave marketing to the marketers; his remit, as he sees it, is to build Tecovas’ personality and depth with imagery and ambiance that reflect the brand’s (and his) Austin roots.
“You have assets that do the heavy lifting for you on social media, commercials, broadcasts, the website,” he said. “And then you have these storytelling opportunities that grow lasting roots in an intangible way.”
