A Boot Collector Feature
The same bootmaker who adapted saddle stitching onto a boot toe at Mercedes Boot Company later built a namesake company around the same obsession with fit — now run by a horseman who spent decades on the wholesale side of Western retail before taking the reins himself.
Rod Patrick's bootmaking career started well before this company bore his name. In 1975 he founded Mercedes Boot Company, developing the round-toe, double-stitched welt design he's still known for, before selling that business in 1989. He went on to start his own eponymous company in Weatherford, Texas, carrying the same hand-lasted, made-to-measure approach into a shop built entirely around his name.
Around 2010, Miller International, the parent company behind the Western apparel brand Cinch, acquired Rod Patrick Bootmakers. Bobby Smith, who had spent 22 years in Western wholesale retail and managed design and product development for Cinch, moved his family from Denver to run the company. Around 2016, Smith relocated the operation from Weatherford to a new flagship store at 2900 West 6th Street in Fort Worth, a move he's said was partly inspired by his wife, Kelly, spotting the location after a camera store moved out.
The construction is deliberately old-fashioned. Every last is gender-specific and goes through its own rounds of prototyping, balancing, and wear-testing before it's used. The boots are built with channel stitching, a technique that stitches the vamp, lining, and welt to the ridge under the insole rather than through the sole face directly, and each pair is held together with no fewer than 42 hand-driven lemonwood pegs. A complimentary fitting measures more than 20 points across the foot, calf, and ankle before a custom pair is even started. Perhaps the clearest sign of how seriously the shop takes fit: it produces boots in sizes 4 through 17, across thirteen width options from AAAAA to EEEEE, a range most bootmakers don't attempt.
Bobby Smith isn't a hired executive dropped into a boot company he doesn't understand — he's shown Quarter Horses since the 1970s and holds a degree in accounting and agricultural economics, a combination that put him squarely in the Western industry's wholesale side for over two decades before he ever ran a bootmaker himself. That background is part of why Miller International tapped him to lead Rod Patrick specifically: someone who already knew the customer, not just the balance sheet.
From Rod Patrick's own hands in Weatherford to Bobby Smith's flagship on West 6th Street, the company has changed owners and cities without changing what it measures a boot by: fit, down to the width.
See more at rodpatrickboots.com