Lucchese Boots, the Company of Artists and Entrepreneurs

What do you get when you cross Italian leather artistry with Texas entrepreneurialism? You get Lucchese cowboy boots!

Boots and a dream
The year was 1880. Seventeen year old Sam Lucchese arrived in America with a dream and his brothers, Mike and Joe. With them and three years later, he started business of the Lucchese Boot Company in San Antonio, Texas.

Three generations and hundreds of handmade boots later, his grandson, Sam Lucchese, Jr., grew the boot-making business into the enviable enterprise it is today. Beginning in 1961, Lucchese boots entered the corporate era, producing creative cowboy boots to the envy of relatives preparing pasta back in Lucca, Italy.

"If you cut leather for your boots in the same way you would carve up a meat carcass for your dinner table, you will be in good shape." -- Sam Lucchese, Jr.

Handmade manufacture
The business has captured the unique combination of handmade artistry and not-quite mass manufacture. Lucchese brand boots make a unique combination of manual work and automation. This keeps the cost down while delivering a custom, nearly hand crafted, high quality product.

As such, it takes 15 days to produce a pair of boots from start to finish. A video shows how a boot happens in those days. No run-of-the-mill stamping out of boots by the dozens. At every point in the process the boots are constructed by creative people, skilled in their caring artistic talents. Some automation, such as cutting, polishing, seaming, and turning the boot top from inside-out to outside-out, performs some jobs best. But every step in the process experiences the touch--and pride--of a human hand.

Made in Texas
The Lucchese cowboy boot factory operates today in El Paso, Texas. Old Sam Lucchese Sr. started the company in Texas nearly 130 years ago. See a pattern here?

Texas is the home of wildly independent thinkers, shakers, and doers. Big dreams materialize in Texas. And unlike elsewhere, business is welcome in Texas, right along with high regard for those pulling their own weight while creating jobs for others.

My fascination with cowboy boots started with Lucchese's and will, no doubt, end there as well. Yeah, you can get a nice pair--even high-quality handmade pair--of cowboy boots elsewhere. But nowhere else can you get them with the flirtatious flair of Italian style merged with the brazen individuality of Texas bold.

Sources:
http://www.lucchese.com/legend_video.php
http://blog.grapevinehill.com/lucchese-boots/the-story-of-lucchese-boots/