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| El Paso-owned and proud |
Jul. 25 - Jul. 31
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Hollywood stars gravitate toward El Paso boot makers
by Ryan B. Martinez |
Tucked away in Central El Paso is a secret industry where famous people in sunglasses make deals with people who quite probably smell of leather.
“No one really knows about us,” said Scott Wayne Emmerich in his office on South Cotton Street. “We’re just a little shop in El Paso. We haven’t really tried to be known.”
Emmerich is owner of Tres Outlaws Boot Co., one of the high-end cowboy boot and belt makers in El Paso that cater to Hollywood celebrities, Washington officials and influential people.
“El Paso is the boot-making capital of the world,” Emmerich said. “And a lot of people don’t even know it.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Reba McEntire, Tom Cruise and Whoopi Goldberg are among the stars who have patronized Falconhead, the Emmerich retail store in Los Angeles.
Schwarzenegger has bought more than 30 pairs from the store, said co-owner Jerry Black, 63.
“After he became governor, his wife Maria said he needed tboots that went with a suit,” said Black, adding that the heels and toes of Schwarzenegger’s boots tend toward the conservative, but the upper parts hidden by his pant legs are more daring and flamboyant.
“Arnold’s gonna be Arnold. He’ll always be. He can get away with it the way other people can’t,” Black said.
Established in 1994, the company grew out of Emmerich’s traveling “trunk shows” in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when he moved through L.A. selling boots made by Black to Hollywood big shots like Dustin Hoffman, he said.
Since then, Tres Outlaws has serviced mostly higher-ups.
The $700 to $50,000 price range excludes many El Paso customers, said Emmerich, although he counts some local doctors, attorneys and ranchers among his clients. His 17-person staff also occasionally crafts low-priced boots for New Mexico ranchers. Overall, the business makes more than $1 million in revenue each year, Black said.
Emmerich said the appeal of his boots for non-cowboys is the personal touch of handcraftsmanship and custom designs. He and Black take customers’ ideas and develop them, he said.
“We’ll get a package with really rough sketches and then we’ll take the boots and redesign them,” Black said, showing a sketch of military symbols for a birthday surprise he was preparing for an ex-military customer.
After the design process, the manufacturing begins. Workers cut leather, assemble material, hand-last, stitch, cut and finish. It takes 100 hours on average, Black said.
At a modest 130 pairs a month, Emmerich keeps the process as authentically Old West as possible, he said.
“All these sewing machines are from 1900 to 1910,” he said. “They’re beautiful for my business. They’re the only machines I like.”
The oldest way
Nevena Christi, owner of Rocketbuster Boots on Anthony Street, shares in Emmerich’s enthusiasm for old-fashioned, handcrafted boot making.
“We wanted to do everything the oldest way, the slowest way,” she said. “What we do is so specific. We’re just a handful of people.”
With a staff of 12 behind her, Christi took over the 15-year-old company from her husband, photographer and boot-maker Marty Snortum, in 1997.
“I’ve been boss for half of its life, and the more successful half,” she joked. She and Snortum met in 1995 when, as a New York-based designer for Nicole Miller, she enlisted Snortum’s help for an Oriental-meets-Old-West fashion line.
The two fell in love and married, and he passed the reins to her so that he could focus on photography.
The Rocketbuster workspace hints at the vibrant pulp-vintage style of its boot line: Western comics from the 1930s, scantily-clad cowgirls embroidered with light bulbs, neon signs and pinball machines fill the large room with light and color.
The space also boasts the world’s largest pair of boots, as determined by the Guinness Book of Records, standing at 4 feet 6 inches. People come from as far as Japan to see them, said Christi.
The normal-sized boots range in price from $750 to $3,000, placing Rocketbusters squarely in the celebrity market.
Christi said clients include Spielberg, Schwarzenegger, Oprah Winfrey, Mel Gibson, Selma Hayek – and Hall and Oates’ Darryl Hall.
“His assistant’s always calling us,” she said, warmly. “He has entirely too much time on his hands.”
She also said Steven Spielberg requested a pair of boots bearing a portrait of his entire family, including him, his wife, seven children, two dogs and a parrot.
Different edges
Christi isn’t worried that she and Emmerich share customers, because they each have different niches, she said.
“Out of the five best boot makers, we all make different, very specific stuff,” she said. “Tres Outlaws have a different sort of edge than we do.”
Although her clientele is elite, Christi said she wishes El Paso as a whole would embrace its heritage as a cowboy hub of the Old West.
“Did you know that if there were a boot museum in this town, people would fly all over the world to see it?” she said. “There’s a great history in a craft that is unique to this town.”
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