Tecovas is investing in vibes with ‘Love Letter to Texas’
A new short film premiered at SXSW over the weekend, written and directed by Jeff Nichols (Mud, The Bikeriders) starring Oscar nominee Michael Shannon, Oscar-winning singer/songwriter Ryan Bingham, Hassie Harrison, and narrated by Oscar winner Sissy Spacek. Love Letter to Texas is a 12-minute story of personal reinvention, and a beautiful visual tribute to some of the Lone Star state’s most photogenic and iconic backdrops in film history.
It’s also Tecovas ad, bankrolled and produced by the Western apparel and cowboy boot brand.
Founded in 2015, Tecovas is a new brand in a category steeped in heritage. It began as the “Warby Parker of Boots” but has since opened 56 stores around the U.S., including in New York City and Boston. In 2024 the company surpassed $250 million in revenue, and expected to pass the $300 million mark in 2025.
Tecovas vice-president of brand marketing Samantha Fodrowski says Love Letter to Texas represents the brand’s ambition to show people it puts the same amount of care and attention to detail into its content as it does its cowboy boots.
”We want to be known as a brand that really is investing in craft,” says Fodrowski. “If that’s something that people start to recognize and associate with Tecovas, that’s a win for us. It has nothing to do with selling products. It’s about how we’re making that first introduction.”
If this film is any indication, it’ll be a helluva ride.
Love Letter
High profile brand entertainment has hit the mainstream, with projects like the unprecedented deal struck between AB InBev and Netflix, WhatsApp working with Modern Arts on a Netflix doc about the Mercedes F1 team, to Dick’s Sporting Goods formally establishing an internal entertainment studio. But smaller brands, like Huckberry, are also making shrewd investments in longer form content.
It really should come as no surprise that Tecovas is investing in longer form brand content, considering it brought on Scott Ballew as its vice-president of creative in 2024, after Ballew led Yeti’s film and content work for more than a decade.
His first piece of work for Tecovas was “True West,” a brand manifesto of sorts, both visually and in its script. Directed by Ballew, narrator artist Terry Allen says, “The true west has no fences. There’s an edge, but you got to find it.” As artful shots of open spaces, horses, and running trains, which Ballew describes as a Texas fever dream, it ends with Allen saying, “Now, we might not need more people in the West, but would it hurt to have a little more west in the people?”
The spot ran in limited markets over 2025, but the brand then decided to put it on Peacock for the Super Bowl this year. Ballew says that the idea for Love Letter came about as a result of feeling they “left some meat on the bone” and had more to show and tell about how the brand feels about its home state.
“Jeff [Nichols] came up with the idea of taking some of these scenes, characters, storylines and locations, and take inspiration from this handful of films and make our own story out of it,” says Ballew. Scenes for the film were deliberately shot at locations featured in iconic Texas-shot movies like There Will Be Blood, Giant, No Country for Old Men, and Paris, Texas.
While Ballew’s work at Yeti helped popularize brands creating character-driven documentary content, he sees an opportunity for Tecovas to zag. “Now everyone has their own little documentary thing going, which makes none of them feel important or unique or original,” says Ballew. So being able to cast and write a script and scout and be really specific with the style and the look and the pace, is a new way to find your own thumbprint.”
Building the roots
Too often an investment like this in longer form brand entertainment can be seen as self-indulgent for a brand. But CEO David Lafitte sees it as part of a much bigger picture. He says that the role of a cinematic project like Love Letter to Texas is to provide the essential “heavy lifting” of brand building that prevents a company from getting trapped in a cycle of purely transactional marketing.
“If you don’t do the heavy lifting of brand awareness and brand building, the lower funnel performance marketing conversion becomes a merry-go-round that’s hard to get off of,” says Lafitte. By focusing on what Lafitte says is a “North Star” of authentic storytelling, the brand is attracting a more engaged consumer. This ultimately boosts efficiency at the lower funnel because it builds an emotional connection that “qualified traffic” responds to more effectively than repetitive conversion ads.
Fodrowski says projects like this become a shorthand for people to know who the brand is and its perspective. “We’re coming into this space as a newer brand in a craft that’s been around for over a hundred years,” she says. “And so we have to have our own take on what that looks like. We talk a lot at Tecovas about the idea of honoring the West and crafting its future. This really speaks to that.”
Ballew is the first to say he’s much more of a creative lens than a marketer. He knows that films like this aren’t for results next week, next quarter or even next year. He likens a brand to a growing tree.
“When a company grows quickly and starts developing a cult following, and there’s this need to grow and grow and sell and sell, the tree gets really top heavy and all these things like Instagram and TikTok ads are adding leaves, and making the tree fuller,” he says. “And I’ve always felt like my job is to build the roots deeper so that the tree lasts a long time. So these projects that I’m interested in are root builders to keep the foundation steady.”
The film will launch on Tecovas social and digital channels on April 7th, and the brand plans to hold screenings at its stores across the country. Giddyup.