A Boot Collector Feature
A Spanish bootmaker started by a tanner's son who came back from America with cowboy culture on his mind — now five generations and over a century deep.
Andrés Sendra, the son of leather tanners, founded his bootmaking company in 1913 in Almansa, in Spain's Albacete province, after returning from America inspired by the cowboy culture he'd encountered there. Just two years later, in 1915, the company adopted Goodyear-welt construction, a technical commitment to durable, repairable boots that became a hallmark of the brand. Sendra expanded into the American market in 1962 and Germany in 1965, broadening its international footprint well beyond Spain. In 1988 the brand launched a biker boot line that became just as central to its identity as its Western roots, and by the late 1990s Sendra had crossed into fashion credibility, with its "Blue Bird" model finding commercial success and the brand appearing on international runways. The business has stayed in family hands across four generations, from Andrés through his great-grandson Francisco Javier Sendra, the current director, with a fifth generation bringing the company online in 2007 and launching its first dedicated web store in 2010.
Goodyear-welt construction applied across two very different boot traditions — Western and biker — a combination that's let Sendra build credibility with both cowboy-boot traditionalists and the fashion and motorcycle-boot crowd simultaneously.
Over a century of Spanish bootmaking, still family-run.