A Boot Collector Feature
A retired horse veterinarian with no bootmaking background took over a mismanaged startup in 1996 — and twenty-five years later, one customer wore his "lucky" pair of J.B. Hill boots into actual space.
Dr. James Hill was a retired equine veterinarian and former racehorse owner from Florida with no background in bootmaking or retail when he first invested in a struggling upstart boot operation in El Paso. After discovering the existing team had mismanaged the funds without ever producing a boot, Hill took the company over outright in 1996 and taught himself the business from the ground up.
The shop runs on a mix of genuine tradition and antique equipment: vintage dies and stamps, retro Singer sewing machines still doing the stitching, and a team of master bootmakers, many of them multi-generational craftspeople with roots in Mexico's own bootmaking regions. Leather comes from as far as Australia, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom, insoles are pegged to shanks with Mexican lemonwood, and some customers supply their own hides from game they've hunted themselves.
Production stays deliberately small, around ten pairs a day, with roughly 99 percent of orders fully custom, starting near $825 and running six to ten weeks to complete. Hill has described the process bluntly: "It's unbelievably complex," with a master bootmaker overseeing each individual pair rather than a line splitting the work into isolated steps. A signature mark on the boots themselves: a star stitched into the sides of the vamp, the shop's quiet way of identifying its own work at a glance.
In 2021, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wore a pair of J.B. Hill boots during his Blue Origin New Shepard spaceflight near Van Horn, Texas, reportedly the same pair he'd worn through every test flight leading up to launch — his self-described "lucky boots." Dr. Hill's reaction to the exposure was characteristically understated.
"They're a special pair of boots, and I'm delighted that he calls them his lucky boots."— Dr. James Hill, on Jeff Bezos's spaceflight boots
A veterinarian who once knew nothing about boots now runs a shop precise enough that one customer trusted the same pair through every test flight and the real thing.