With its dusty terrain and renegade reputation, Texas has figured big in so many movies that it’s nearly a character unto itself. There are classic Westerns (Giant), neo-Westerns (No Country for Old Men), dramas (Dallas Buyers Club), and a herd of others forever branded to Texas by title alone: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The King of Texas, Murder in Texas, and, simply, Texas.
Entering the fray is Love Letter to Texas, a short film from director Jeff Nichols, best known for 2012’s Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey. Love Letter to Texas is full of things you’d expect—horses, sagebrush, lonely motel rooms—and one thing you might not: an upstart brand that quietly bankrolled the whole thing.
Tecovas, the decade-old outfitter best known for its pearl-snap shirts and goatskin boots, underwrote the 14-minute work. And while there’s no shortage of Tecovas apparel in the frame, it’s inaccurate to call the film a commercial—or even marketing, at least in the traditional sense.
“We did not set out to create a campaign. We wanted to put more of a cultural stake in the ground,” Tecovas vp of brand marketing Samantha Fodrowski told ADWEEK. “We want to evolve as a brand that shows up with a genuine point of view when it comes to art and culture.”
Laying claim to art and culture is ambitious stuff, given that Tecovas is a newcomer to a category where boot-makers like Tony Lama and Lucchese have legacies that date to 1911 and 1883, respectively. Even so, the brand founded in 2015 by entrepreneur Paul Hedrick (a Harvard MBA who grew tired of private equity life) has been on a gallop.
Fueled by a 2022 Series C funding round worth $56 million, Tecovas has been building stores around the country. (Its 4,500-square-foot Manhattan flagship, opened last summer, was its 50th.) Earlier this year, the brand truly rode with the cowboys by advertising in the Super Bowl.
That effort, titled “True West,” was the in-house work of creative VP Scott Ballew, a musician and documentary filmmaker who created cinematic shorts for Yeti before joining Tecovas in October 2024. Ballew is happy to leave marketing to the marketers; his remit, as he sees it, is to build Tecovas’ personality and depth with imagery and ambiance that reflect the brand’s (and his) Austin roots.
“You have assets that do the heavy lifting for you on social media, commercials, broadcasts, the website,” he said. “And then you have these storytelling opportunities that grow lasting roots in an intangible way.”
Thematically, Love Letter to Texas picks up where “True West” left off. The minute-long spot featured a boy aboard an Amtrak Superliner peering out at a cowboy riding apace with the train. The minute-long “fever dream” (Ballew’s term) likened the West to a quest for independence and individuality. (“Being brave isn’t about being different,” intoned the narrator. “It’s about being yourself.”)
Having immersed himself in the West Texas terrain of roadside neon and empty railroad tracks, Ballew felt that “we left some meat on the bone” after the Super Bowl spot. He wanted to create “something really cool that we could do with these locations, connected to the spirit of these places.”
Fortunately, Ballew was already friends with director Jeff Nichols, whom he’d met at the Telluride Film Festival when both had works being screened. Nichols signed on, as did Sissy Spacek to narrate, and Oscar-winning musician and actor Ryan Bingham to play the lead role of Sam. Without giving too much away, Sam is “leaving his inherited destiny he was born into, roams across the desert, and stumbles into a life that’s better suited to his spirit,” Ballew said.
Much like Tecovas’ Big Game spot, the “rugged individualism of the West,” as Ballew put it, remains Love Letter’s central theme. It’s an appealing metaphor when it comes to selling cowboy boots to East Coast urbanites. Fortunately for Tecovas, the culture is moving westward already. Already worth $290 million, the cowboy boot market is growing both geographically and fiscally, on track to hit $539 million by 2035, per Future Marketing Insights.
Ballew conceded that Love Letter represented “an investment” for Tecovas. But it’s a type that other brands are making, too. With overt product placements already packing every movie—a given movie has an average of 13 of them, according to Sortlist data—enterprising brands have moved toward underwriting a film to get their cultural bona fides, and leaving the film to the filmmakers.
In 2020, for example, WeTransfer funded Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye. In 2024, Saint Laurent bankrolled Emilia Pérez, by Jacque Audiard. Tecovas’ products do appear in Love Letter to Texas, but are not identified as such. A title card is the only name check that Tecovas gets.
Will it pay off? Ballew conceded that there’s no real way to measure the benefits for the brand that takes the leap of faith to support a film. “Not everyone has the guts to do that,” he said.
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