Mercedes Boot Company · History

History

Mercedes Boot Company is a custom cowboy-boot company founded in 1975. Sources differ on where it began: Texas Monthly says it started in Fort Worth, Texas, while the company's own site and a later profile say it was founded in Mercedes, Texas, and moved to the outskirts of the Fort Worth Stockyards only in 1989.

Debby Matthews, then an art designer at Western Media, had the company as a catalog account before marrying George Sossamon, a horseman and horse-show judge, in 1989 and leaving her job to help run the boots. Texas Monthly dates the Sossamon family's purchase of the company to 1989; a later profile places the purchase sometime before the marriage, without giving an exact year. In the early 1990s the company employed 22 people, with a showroom near the Fort Worth Stockyards and a separate production shop and warehouse in Fort Worth. It made both a stock line and custom boots, selling at horse-show booths; specialties included high tops built for riders, double-stitched welts, and heels finished with Vibram caps. Clients included cutters and horse trainers.

George Sossamon died in 2000. The year before, in 1991, Debby had begun learning parts of the boot from the shop's own makers, including bottoming taught by a former Nocona Boot Company craftsman. She moved the showroom within Fort Worth in 2004, and by about 2005 the shop had shifted to concentrate on custom orders. She married James Farr in April 2008. A 2012 road project displaced the Fort Worth shop; after a search, the company used a building in Ben Wheeler, Texas, and later a shop on the Farrs' ranch in Terrell, Texas. The company says its boots are made to measure, one pair at a time, in more than 250 steps, and sold direct rather than through western stores.