A Boot Collector Feature
A photographer traded a 1953 Cadillac hearse for a boot business, married the fashion designer who took it over, and built a shop where Taylor Swift, Willie Nelson, and a Coach handbag collection all eventually came calling.
Marty Snortum was a commercial photographer working in El Paso, a city once known as the Boot Capital of America, when he noticed something missing: the colorful, wildly imaginative boots El Paso factories had turned out in the 1940s had all but vanished, replaced by what he called "a sea of brown and black boring boots." In 1989, after meeting a German-born bootmaker over drinks, Snortum traded his 1953 Cadillac hearse for the man's boot business outright. He named the new venture Rocketbuster after his own classic Oldsmobile Rocket Eighty-Eight, and in 1992 moved the growing operation into a converted early-1900s fur trappers' warehouse in El Paso's Union Plaza Historic District, where it still operates today.
In 1996, Snortum married Nevena Christi, a California-born fine art graduate who had designed cocktail dresses for Nicole Miller in New York. She took over as creative director, known at the shop simply as "Bosslady," the following year, and reshaped Rocketbuster around her own eye: hand-drawn custom patterns, a measurement system she invented that accounts for calf size, foot width, and arch height, and an individual last built for every customer. "As an artist, I don't want to make the same thing twice," she's said of the approach.
The eight-person workshop turns out roughly 350 pairs a year, about six a week, each taking around five months from first sketch to finished boot, in leathers sourced as specifically as French calf, Italian kangaroo, and Massachusetts goat. What actually sets Rocketbuster apart is the design work itself: hand inlay, overlay, and painted detail that can depict almost anything a customer can describe. Past commissions have included family crests, religious symbols, peacock feathers, a surgeon's own anatomical spine, and a personalized map of Texas. For Willie Nelson's 80th birthday, the shop built him a pair charting his own life story in imagery and musical notation.
Documented clients include Sylvester Stallone, Kendrick Lamar, Jane Fonda, Shaboozey, Taylor Swift, Ethan Hawke, and Willie Nelson, with pairs spotted at the Grammy Awards, Coachella, and a Super Bowl halftime show. Most recently, Coach commissioned Rocketbuster directly for a limited-edition run of its Tabby Collection handbags, featuring the shop's inlay, overlay, and hand-painted butterfly work; the line sold out. As Christi put it when the collaboration launched: "Now New York is looking at El Paso. And El Paso is the boot capital of the world."
"Now New York is looking at El Paso. And El Paso is the boot capital of the world."— Nevena Christi, on the Coach collaboration
The shop itself is part of the draw. A section of the building's wall, shelved with finished boots, is built on a central pivot: normally it faces inward as part of the interior showroom, but the whole structure can physically rotate so that same shelf of boots swings around to face the street instead, turning an interior display into an exterior one without a single pair being touched or moved. The walls are hung with decades of collected antiques, and a dedicated shelf holds vintage boots worth studying on their own. Part of the actual bootmaking happens in view of the showroom floor, so a visit doubles as a short, unplanned lesson in how the boots get built in the first place.
Thirty-five years after a hearse got traded for a boot shop, Rocketbuster is still building one-of-a-kind pairs out of the same El Paso warehouse — and a fashion house just came calling to borrow the style for handbags.
See more at rocketbuster.com Their boot galleries alone are worth setting aside real time for — some of the most striking custom work you'll find anywhere.