A Boot Collector Feature

Justin Boots

Started with five dollars and a repair kit on the Chisholm Trail, split down the middle by a father-daughter feud over a railroad move, and bought back together fifty-five years later.

The Story

Herman Joseph "H.J." Justin started with five dollars and a bag of tools, repairing boots for cattlemen passing through Spanish Fort, Texas, on the Chisholm Trail in 1879, before he began building boots of his own. His wife Annie worked the business alongside him, and in 1887 she developed something the company had never needed before: a self-measuring kit customers could use at home and mail back in, letting cowboys who might never see a Justin storefront still order a boot built to their own feet.

The Justins followed the railroad to Nocona, Texas in 1889, and the company grew into a family partnership, H. J. Justin & Sons, when sons John and Earl came aboard in 1908. In 1925, the family moved the business again, this time to Fort Worth for room to expand — a decision H.J.'s daughter, Enid Justin, flatly disagreed with. She stayed behind and started her own rival company instead, naming it Nocona Boots after the town the family had just left.

Justin Industries, as the company came to be known, spent the back half of the twentieth century growing well beyond boots: a 1968 merger with Acme Brick, the Chippewa Shoe Company in 1984, and Tony Lama Boots in 1990. In 1981, it acquired Nocona Boots outright, quietly reuniting the family business Enid had split off from more than half a century earlier. In 2000, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought Justin Industries, and the boots are still made under the Justin name today.

The Mail-Order Giant

Annie Justin’s self-measuring kit made Justin one of the two giants of mail-order cowboy boots. By the early 1900s Justin and Hyer of Kansas were each other’s main competition, leaving smaller shops and even Sears and Montgomery Ward behind; by the 1920s most small shops that depended on mail order had closed. Justin’s Nocona shop was also a training ground. Carl Olsen worked there before founding Olsen-Stelzer, and Gus Blucher learned the mail-order business there before opening his own company in Wyoming, later joined by two more Nocona men, William Flournoy and Ray Powers.

What They're Known For

Justin's earliest signature was practical: H.J. began stitching decorative patterns across the tops of his boots specifically to stiffen the leather, a functional trick that became a defining Western boot look. The company is also credited with originating the Roper boot — a lower-heeled, round-toed style built for working around livestock rather than riding — and with introducing the "heart boot," a heart-shaped stitched motif that remains one of the most recognized decorative patterns in Western bootmaking. The company still maintains a working archive of its own designs going back to 1879, which its own product developers use to bring older patterns back with modern updates.

Notable Wearers

Justin's clearest claim to fame isn't a single celebrity closet but its reach into American sport and ranching culture at scale: the brand has held long-running sponsorships with major rodeo organizations and the Texas Rangers baseball team, and its boots remain a working standard on ranches as much as a fashion statement off them.