A Boot Collector Feature
A shoe salesman opened a downtown shoe store in 1915, and four generations of his family are still building boots on the same San Antonio street — each pair stamped inside with its owner's name and the year it was made.
Lucien Little was a shoe salesman covering Southwest Texas when he opened a shoe store on Commerce Street in downtown San Antonio in 1915. Business was good, and he added a shoe repair department. One of the cobblers he hired was also a bootmaker, and that cobbler taught Lucien’s son Ben how to make cowboy boots. What started as a shoe store grew into custom bootmaking, and the business has stayed a genuine family operation for more than a century since. His son Ben Little carried the shop from the 1930s to 1966, expanding its reach and building boots that blended ranch durability with real style as the company's reputation grew beyond working cowboys into both ranch heritage and urban sophistication. The shop moved to its current South Division Avenue location in the 1950s.
Ben's sons, John and Dave Little, carried the business through the 1960s, '70s, and '80s — Dave was Sharon Little's father. Today, Lucien's great-grandchildren, Sharon and her brother Duane, run the company together: Sharon handles leather procurement, Duane builds the boots, and nephew-in-law Royal Brown, who married into the family, works alongside them as a bootmaker in his own right. The shop celebrated its hundredth year in business in 2015, and is still, more than a century after Lucien first opened his doors, entirely family-run.
By the 1940s Ben Little was building fancy boots with pointed toes, pitched heels, overlays, and dense rows of stitching. His reputation stood alongside that of his contemporary Cosimo Lucchese, and the Little Boot Shop ranked among San Antonio’s premier bootmakers. Both of his sons became master bootmakers. When Ben died in 1966, John, the elder, took charge of the shop and kept it making top-quality traditional Western boots; collectors prize John L. Little boots for their tough, uncompromising elegance.
Dave Little was an artist as well as a bootmaker. Starting in the 1970s he pushed the boundaries of the conventional cowboy boot, and with his daughter Sharon he carried the family tradition into its next generation.
Every custom pair goes through a ten-step handcrafted process: individual measurements, a properly sized resin last, and leather shaped entirely by hand by craftsmen with 15 or more years of experience, typically taking eight to nine months start to finish. Materials run from standard leather up through crocodile, alligator, ostrich, and kangaroo, and the shop's most recognizable decorative signature is its wildflower-and-leaf inlay work — a distinctive, almost botanical style that sets Little's boots apart from more geometric Western patterns at a glance. Every pair is stamped inside with its owner's name and the year it was made, turning each boot into a small, personal record as much as a piece of footwear.
Little's has built boots for musician Huey Lewis, author Alex Haley, country star Reba McEntire, and actor Tommy Lee Jones, and its work has appeared in an Absolut Vodka advertising campaign. Closer to home, the shop is a fixture during San Antonio's Fiesta and rodeo seasons, building boots for the city's Texas Cavaliers royalty and for rodeo royalty alike. Its most expensive build to date was a crocodile pair that ran $13,000.
Four generations after Lucien Little first opened his shoe store, his great-grandchildren are still building boots on the same San Antonio street, one wildflower stitch at a time.
See more at littlesboots.com