 |
|
|
|||||
Everywhere you turn these days, you’ll find someone wearing a fabulous pair of cowboy boots. Throughout the summer, Beyoncé and her legions of fans wore bedazzled pairs for her Cowboy Carter tour. Some of the hottest TV shows right now, from Yellowstone to The Hunting Wives, feature fabulous Western style. Then there’s fashion: Brands ranging from Louis Vuitton to Gap to Mother Denim have recently released cowboy-inspired collections. The market for cowboy boots alone is expected to hit $289.7 million in 2025 and reach $538.6 million by 2035. Lizzie Means Duplantis and Sarah Means, the sisters who founded cult cowboy boot brand Miron Crosby, are keen observers of this footwear style. They point out that even as cowboy boots periodically break into mainstream American culture, in many parts of the country people wear cowboy boots everyday, with all kinds of outfits. “We grew up on a cattle ranch in West Texas that has been in our family since 1884,” says Means. “We had rugged everyday boots, but also fancy boots we would wear on special occasions. We would wear them with jeans and with ball gowns.” [Photo: Besita] The sisters are on a mission to turn the cowboy boot into a closet staple across America. They launched their direct-to-consumer brand in 2017, selling luxurious, fashion-forward Miron Crosby boots worn by everyone from Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves to supermodel Gigi Hadid. The label is known for boots with unique embellishments (like hearts and stars that look hand-drawn) crafted from exceptionally supple leathers in artisanal factories. With its designs priced from $1,096 to $3,295, Miron Crosby is a more upscale version of Tecovas, a direct-to-consumer brand focused on making affordable, everyday cowboy boots. But Duplantis and Means now want to bring their fashion-forward aesthetic to a broader audience. So today they’re launching Besita, a new label with more accessibly priced boots (ranging from $395 to $795) selling at Anthropologie, LoveShackFancy, Boot Barn, and other retail stores. “People have been awakened to the romance of the West,” says Means. “But we believe this isn’t just a trend. I think people are beginning to realize that cowboy boots are a versatile shoe that is central to the American aesthetic.” [Photo: Besita] The Craft of the Cowboy Boot Growing up in Texas, Duplantis and Means saw cowboy boots as heirlooms. On their ranch, beautiful pairs crafted with intricate designs were passed down from their grandparents and great-grandparents. “There’s a lot of craftsmanship that goes into creating these boots,” Duplantis says. “Where other people would ask for jewelry to mark special occasions, we would ask for boots.” When they launched Miron Crosby, their goal was to create fashionable cowboy boots with a high level of craftsmanship. This was an unusual move. Whenever cowboy boots come into fashion, brands seem to capitalize by making Western-looking styles in the same mass-market factories where their other shoes are made. In contrast, Duplantis and Means sought out factories that had been making boots for generations, including one in Mercedes, Texas, and several in Leon, Mexico, known as the capital of cowboy boot-making. [Photo: Besita] The sisters launched Miron Crosby with Caroline Cree, an Irish designer who has worked at American legacy brands like Coach, Lands End, and Gap. Cree has brought a keen interest in fine arts to her work. Every season, her new designs start with hand-drawn sketches, often inspired by nature. In her recent collections for Miron Crosby, there are boots covered in stars, flowers, and feathers. There’s a tall boot full of complex drawings of constellations and zodiac signs. And since the sisters’ family farm is called Moon Ranch, moons are a common motif. Cree digitizes the hand drawings, then the artisans in the factory begin incorporating them into the boots, using all kinds of complex, labor-intensive techniques. For instance, they create inlays of designs, which involves cutting out shapes on the leather, revealing a different color underneath. They also do appliqué, which involves cutting out shapes and stitching them onto the boots. “Each boot takes hours of labor and generational knowledge,” Cree says. [Photo: Besita] Making A More Affordable Pair For Besita, the team wanted to create boots that were just as beautiful and expertly made, but at a more affordable price. To do this, Cree created designs that were slightly less labor intensive to make. While the Miron Crosby boots are covered in inlays, Besita boots have just a few. And while artisans often cut out the Miron Crosby designs by hand, Cree created Besita designs that can be more easily laser cut by machine. Another difference is the leather itself. Miron Crosby uses some of the most expensive leathers on the market, like exotic pythons, and kid skins typically used in expensive gloves. It also uses fashion-forward leathers such as gold and iridescent foils. The Besita boots use high-quality but more commonly available cow hides. But the Besita boots are made in the same Leon factories that make Miron Crosby boots. “Besita means little kiss in Spanish,” says Cree. “It’s a way of paying homage to the Mexican factories.” Ultimately, Duplantis and Means hope that Besita introduces the cowboy boot to an even wider audience. They’ve partnered with a range of retailers that are styling the boots in many ways. The boots will be sold in the Texas-based department store St. Bernard, where consumers will likely be familiar with the cowboy boot aesthetic. But they will also be available at LoveShackFancy, which has a distinctively feminine, Victorian-inspired vibe, and Anthropologie, where they will be styled with the retailer’s characteristically boho-chic flair. “It will be fun to create a whole look around your cowboy boots at these stores,” says Duplantis.
Category:
E-Commerce
David Marquet was formerly captain of the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe and is the best-selling author of Turn the Ship Around, which tells the story of transforming that submarine from the worst-performing to the best-performing sub in the fleet. Since retiring from the Navy, he has worked with businesses globally as a leadership consultant. Mike Gillespie is an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida who studies how to make organizations more effective. He teaches organizational psychology and directs the Human Applied Cognition and Decision-Making Lab. Whats the big idea? Great leaders have a superpower that lets them remove many of their biases, see reality more clearly, and make better decisions: distance. By distancing themselves from situations along the dimensions of identity (what if I were someone else?), place (what if I was in a different position?), and time (what if I was in the future?) they can connect with the essence of what is truly important. Below, coauthors Marquet and Gillespie share five key insights from their new book, Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions. Listen to the audio versionread by Marquetin the Next Big Idea app. 1. We live in a curated reality. In the early 1980s, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove, who were running Intel, faced a critical dilemma. Intel, founded a decade and a half earlier, was slipping in its original businessmemory chipsbut had developed a new product, the 4004 microprocessor. The two leaders remained paralyzed for over a year, unable to make the decision to shift the companys focus to microprocessors because the idea of abandoning memory chips was just too painful. The breakthrough came when Grove asked Moore a pivotal question: If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do? Moore replied instantly, He would get us out of memories. And so thats what they did. No new information, no new market updates, no reprocessing of the data. Just a reframe that dropped the accumulated weight of all the decisions from the past and broke through a year of drift. This sudden clarity emerged because Moore and Grove exited their self-immersed state, where their identity was deeply tied to memory chips. The key to seeing clearly was to look at the situation from the perspective of someone who did not have that accumulated baggage and, even though it was imagined, it worked. Without our awareness, our brains naturally curate what we perceive and encourage us to protect our image, our sense of self, our precious ego. These so-called self-serving biases distort reality, hinder growth, and result in worse decision-making. Taking on a different perspective is a simple way to shed these biases. As a nuclear submarine captain, every once in a while, an officer would come to me with a plan that was optimized for their department but not for the submarine as a whole. I would ask them variations of the following: What would you do if you were me? Id leave them alone for a minute (typically, to get a cup of coffee), and when I came back, they had a new plan. A better plan that was optimized for the submarine as a whole. Again, no new information, no new analysis, just a reframe of the situation from the perspective of someone else. 2. Distance gives better perspective. As we distance ourselves from something, the details blur, and whats left is the essence of the thing. If that thing” is a decision, with distance our brain focuses on whats important in the big picture and doesnt get distracted by details that only seem so important in the here and now. Think about a tree. When standing right next to it, you see ripples in the bark and a beetle crawling up the trunk. You see not just the individual leaves, but the veins in the leaves. Then you start walking back. The bark blurs, and the individual leaves fade. Now you see a tree. You can tell it is an oak tree and discern the shape of its major branches. As you keep moving away, it becomes just a green dot on the horizon. Just a tree. You are down to the essence of the thing. The farther you are from the decision, the more your brain sees what matters most. Now replace the tree with a decision: What should I major in? Should I attend a conference? Should I get a new job? When should I retire? The same thing happens. The farther you are from the decision, the more your brain sees what matters most. Distance works whether you physically change your perspective (as in the tree example) or if you imagine a different one. For example, you can become someone else. It also works if you imagine yourself being somewhere else or sometime else. We explore these three dimensions in the book: be someone else, be somewhere else, or be sometime else. This is psychological distancing. With psychological distance, we think about things, ideas, or decisions differently. Distance changes the way we mentally construe things. The underlying science here is called construal level theory. As things move from closer to farther, our thinking shifts from a lower level of construalthe detailsto a higher level of construalthe essence or purpose. Higher levels of construal and the different forms of psychological distance all go hand in hand. This is why it seems normal to say long ago in a galaxy far, far away, while long ago in a nearby galaxy sounds weird. Another way of saying this is that at lower levels of construal, we are more concerned with the how of the thing, and as we move away toward higher levels of construal, we think more about the what and ultimately the why of the thing. We move from how to make memory chips to what should we even focus on, and why. 3. Be someone else. A great way to get out of our own head is to be someone else. Going back to the Intel story, we see that by asking What would our replacements do?, Moore and Grove invoked the be someone else dimension of psychological distancing. This is particularly effective if you think your attachment to the current situation is making it hard for you to see reality and alternatives in an unbiased way. It does not matter as much who you choose to be so long as it isnt you. Weve seen people imagine themselves as various different others: their replacement, their boss, their grandchildren, their coach, a good friend, and so on. It does not matter as much who you choose to be so long as it isnt you. Almost any distancing will work. So, when you have a decision to make, imagine you are someone else. What would that person say to do? 4. Be somewhere else. We can also mentally teleport to a different location to gain perspective. William Ury is a Distinguished Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project and coauthor of the bestselling book Getting to Yes. In it, he describes the problems that arise from becoming overly immersed in a negotiation. Once we take a position, we argue for it and defend it. We identify with the position and assimilate that position into the image we have of ourselves. That position coul be $100 million for a strategic acquisition (and not a penny more!) or the number of inspections a country is allowed to conduct to verify the absence of nuclear weapons. Compromising on our position means giving up a piece of ourselves. Our brains frame it as a personal loss. In addition to, or even replacing, the original objective of the negotiation, we now have a new objective: saving face. This hijacks our focus from completing the task to protecting our image. But Ury has a trick to keep himself focused on the task at hand: go to the balcony. In the heat of the moment, he likes to take a pause mentally and imagine hes on a balcony, looking down at the negotiations, rather than sitting in his chair at the negotiation table. This activates the distancing mechanisms that create a higher construal level, refocusing on the essence of the task. We can mentally teleport to a different location to gain perspective. So, to gain distance, view the situation from the balcony. Do this in preparation for a stressful event or during a pause in the action. This will keep you on task. 5. Be sometime else. Mental time travel is another powerful way to gain perspective. When Moore and Grove became their replacements, they also took on a bit of a future perspectivebecoming both someone else and sometime else. Becoming a future version of ourselves is a powerful reframe for making better decisions. Jeff Bezos had to make a tough decision to leave his job to start Amazon. He had a great job on Wall Street, and he went to his boss with his idea to sell books on the internet. This was in 1994. His boss told him it was a great idea for someone who didnt already have a job, so he should think about it for a couple of days. Bezos then imagined it this way: When Im 80, what am I going to regret more? Trying and failing or not trying? He imagined himself far from the decision, far from this years bonus and next months rent. When you jump to the far side of a decision and look back on it, your brain reframes it in terms of regret, not change. This biases us toward action as opposed to the inertia of the status quo. In the modern world, where change is happening at an unprecedented rate, this reframe often results in better decisions and a more fulfilling life. So, fastforward to the far side of the decision. Imagine youve already made it, and events have already unfolded. How did it turn out? How do you feel about the different likely scenarios? Now, what would you choose? This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
At many companies, the minimum viable product (MVP) mindset has become gospel. Two-week sprints and move fast, break things slogans keep teams iterating, but they can also trap organizations in a cycle of incrementalismproducing updates that are safe but forgettable. No surprise, then, that the Product Development and Management Association reports roughly 40% of product launches still flopusually because they half-solve the problem or under-delight the user. In study after study, executives acknowledge a frustrating gap: many of their offerings are just good enough to compete, even though they recognize that true differentiation is what drives long-term profit and loyalty. We approach this challenge from both the studio and the boardroom, and weve learned from artists that good enough is an efficiency metric; its great enough, an emotional metric, that we should be measuring instead. Artists know the human reaction is the real brief we are shipping. Businesses that adopt this mindset transform productivity into resonance. The best founders already practice this form of disciplined obsession. Just look at iconic leaders like Walt Disney, Dr. Edwin Land at Polaroid, Steve Jobs at Apple, or Brian Chesky at Airbnb, for example. All of them echo what light-and-space pioneer artist Robert Irwin demanded of his own work: it must read all the way throughfront, back, and the parts no one sees.” Thats the leap from MVP to masterpiece. The antidote to good enough isnt reckless perfectionism or feature bloat: its disciplined obsession. The resolve to push beyond 80% because the final 20% is where usefulness becomes wonder, and customers become fans. Obsession in action Across industries, from consumer electronics to rock concert logistics, breakthroughs consistently appear where teams refuse to settle for almost. Just take these cases where disciplined focus can reshape markets, protect lives, and even rewrite scientific understanding. James Dyson cycled through 5,127 prototypes before perfecting cyclone suction. Each failure exposed a flaw that a good-enough model would have hidden, and today Dyson dominates the premium vacuum segment. Apples Power Mac G4 Cube failed to gain traction at retail, but its fanless cooling and transparent shell laid the groundwork for the design DNA of future iMacs and Mac minis. A costly misstep became a down payment on aesthetic leadership. Van Halens no brown M&Ms clause signaled whether promoters read every line of the safety rider. When the candies showed up, the crew insisted on reinspecting the rigging, an obsessive detail that likely averted catastrophe. In Tonys biotech career, a Phase II trial that missed its endpoint was celebrated, not buried. Mining the data exposed a biomarker that later earned breakthrough-therapy statusproof that failure can be the fastest route to discovery. Different domains, same lesson: the last mile, pursued with rigor, create the leap from adequate to iconic. How to Decide When Obsession Might Pay Off Obsession can fuel excellence or waste months in blind alleys. Heres a litmus test you can apply to see if you are on the right track: Mission-critical or cosmetic? Suction loss in a vacuum is core; the bevel on a handle may not be. Learning or polishing? Each iteration should teach something new; if youre merely burnishing vanity, stop. Will customers notice and pay for the difference? Leica buyers pay for 1% sharper images; paper-towel shoppers wont. Answer yes to all three, and you have a case for a disciplined obsession. How the FOCUS Framework Can Help Creative Breakthroughs In his work with clients, Nir often begins by asking them to bring an object they love, such as a vintage camera, a jazz record, or a battered field watch. Then, he asks them to unpack it: Why does it move you? The answers go beyond function. It’s the heft of the lens, the warmth of analog tone, the weathered patina that tells a story. What surfaces is a powerful insight: the things we love most are often engineered with invisible care. The quality we feel isnt polishits integrity. Once thats understood, good enough begins to feel like a meaningful personal compromise. With this emotional imprint anchored, we introduce FOCUS, our five-part framework for transforming passion into disciplined progress. Frame the nonnegotiable. Name the hill youre willing to die onzero suction loss, five-minute onboarding, or sub-four-second load. This clarity prevents perfectionism from becoming misdirection. Observe edge failures early. Dont wait for scale to see what breaks. Stress-test assumptions with chaos monkeys, red teaming, or real-world extremes from the outset. Capture lessons continuously. Log everything. Iterations that fail one product might spark another. Dysons abandoned cyclone sketches now power its hand-dryers and hair toolsproof that diligent note-keeping multiplies value. Use guardrails. Time-box your obsessions. Define a success metric, test threshold, or insight plateau that signals when to pivot or ship. Share openly. Make learnings public. At Etsy, engineers write postmortems with vulnerability and clarity, turning setbacks into shared wisdom. When Good Enough Really Is Enough Obsession is a scalpel, not a hammer. During the COVID-19 pandemic, good-enough vaccine doses saved millions; waiting for perfect data would have cost lives. In fintech for the unbanked, accessibility beats interface polish. The art is knowing when incremental gains change outcomes and when speed or reach matter more. So pose this question at your next sprint review: Where are we settling for workable when users crave wonderful? If the gap solves a pivotal pain point, grant a Dyson-level runwaythen let FOCUS guardrails protect timelines and morale. When organizations combine disciplined obsession with artistic intent, they dont just out-iterate competitors; they create visceral, memorable experiences that define business artistry. In a sea of sameness, passable products vanish. The obsessively honed few become unforgettable. When the problem matters and each iteration deepens insight, disciplined obsession isnt wasteful; its the fastest route to extrordinary.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||