Tecovas CTO Kevin Harwood on 50-person lines, AI inventory optimization, and radical hospitality across 45 stores

by Shopify alum. And we have a current Shopify uh not an alum. We have Harley back with Kevin from Tokovas in the ream waiting room. Now they're here in the TVP Ultra Dome.

Sorry. Don't mind if I don't mind if I kick my my boots up on the table.

Don't mind if I do, partner.

I don't know if I can reach that high.

This is actually the second pair of Tobas I have. I somebody uh a very nice uh enterprising um young man who now works for us. Came all the way to Los Angeles to interview me. And I think he'd interviewed you or someone from Tokovas because he brought me a pair of TOAs and I was like, "Are you guys sponsored by TOA?" He's like, "No, I just like giving them as gifts to people." and it made a really big impression. I wore them at a wedding in Mexico. It was fantastic.

And we gave some Tokovas to a to a guest and and friend of the show recently, Dylan Patel. Oh, yeah. Friend of ours is one of the top analysts in the semiconductor space. So, he's always going around always going around to different data centers in the back of pickup trucks. And so, we said you should be wearing TOAS when you're out on the road.

Kevin, your work is done here. You should just [laughter] you should just log off at this point. That's great.

No, I just actually love it. Um, but yes, uh, how how is the day going? give us the update on your side. What's the latest?

And you guys are in the Austin store. Is that correct?

1:00 p.m. Pacific, 400 p.m. Eastern.

Yeah, I'm here in Austin South Congress, which is one of our flagship stores. Harley's actually in New York, uh, in our Soho store.

So, the Soho store right now is packed. It's insane, Kevin. You'd be so impressed. It's amazing here. I

I was actually looking around going, I don't know if we can do a live interview in here with how crowded it actually is. So, uh, hopefully it sounds okay. But, yeah, we're being doing great. Uh we've actually got a line of about 50 people still outside the door. We've had that since we've opened this morning's. So just a constant stream of traffic and uh things have been going just fantastic for us. We're having great uh sales online, great sale in all our stores. It's a it's a great Black Friday so far.

You'll be happy to know that Chanel is right across the street and your line here at Tacobas and Soho is longer than the Chanel line across the street. I don't know what that means. I don't know. How competitive Harley,

but I just like just to say like Chanel is not on Shopify.

I knew you were going to say this.

Correlation causation, [laughter] guys.

Ridiculous. Ridiculous.

Uh well, Kevin, it's it's great. How how did you guys did how did you guys first meet? Did uh was was har you guys were born on Shopify or did Harley bang down your door and

shame you publicly into getting on.

So, it's been I've been on Shopify for almost 10 years now. um and have definitely I guess grown up

grown up on Shopify. But actually the first time that Harley and I did something together, but he he basically said that he uh

he wanted me to do a little a fireside chat with him in front of a top 100 Shopify employees on a retreat they were having and he wanted me to say tell them how Shopify sucks. Uh [laughter] and I I told Harley like I'm in. Do I only get an hour? uh you know this is I don't know four or five years ago. Um and so it was great. It was a great opportunity um to get closer with all the product leaders at Shopify and really talk about some things you know that we have on the outside and uh just was an awesome experience to to get more embedded with that too.

You know, I'm sure you guys have this also. I'm sure there's some like advertiser partners that you guys have that they're constantly just giving you great feedback. That's Kevin for Shopify. Kevin will text me at like Saturday night at 11 o'clock and say, "I have an idea about subscriptions." It may have nothing to do with Tovas, but there's constantly this like incredible, you know, feedback loop. The one thing I will say that Kevin's quite modest, so I'm going to say it for him.

You guys remember that era of like retail where for some reason every store for a while had like a cafe and then eventually had like a DJ booth?

Yeah.

Like every store had it and you kind of went in there and you're like, "This doesn't feel right. It feels inauthentic."

Tacobus is kind of the opposite of that for some reason. And I I think like they're very intentional about it. I'm sitting at the bar right now where there's like literally bourbon beer being served to all these people to get them drunk so they buy more boots and cowboy hats. [laughter]

It it feels so authentic here. There is this like junqua about the brand that makes makes them

the way that they handle themselves, the way that they build their stores. There is a certain thing that they do that I think is exceptional. Actually, I think like and we're joking about Chanel, but like I think Chanel like lost a little bit of that. I think, you know, a lot of the luxury retailers wanted to, you know, try to expand that.

Be careful how hard you go on Chanel because they're going to come on Shopify and next year you're going to be here being like Chanel is is back. Like they they never had a made a misstep in their life. [laughter]

Chanel,

right? And and just to piggy back on, that's that's a mindset we have here called Radical Hospitality. And we are always looking for ways to kind of better serve our customers. We do have open bars in all of our retail stores. I'm also sitting here at the Austin bar

drinking a glass of whiskey. We do uh

branding and customizations. There's actually we have branding irons

in the store with blow torches.

Yeah.

And we will heat those uh branding irons up and kind of stamp the boots right there. We've got a boot shine station as well. Um and so really trying to create moments for people to come into the store even if they're not looking to buy and uh just hang out and just create kind of an awesome experience for them there. thing I'm most curious about is like how like how do you how do you view your role as CTO of a of a retail brand when you're powered by infrastructure like Shopify? We were talking with Harley earlier. I think a lot of CTOs of some legacy brands would say like, "No, I'm going to own the full stack. That's my job. I don't want to let it go."

Kevin, how much I mean this is Kevin's favorite topic. Let's go.

Yeah.

Yeah. I figured because there's so much there's so much more that you can

do as a technical leader that's not just like the core like commerce engine. You there's so much more that sits on top of that. So many things that you can optimize marketing etc. So but I'm curious how you view it.

Yeah, there's no reason at this point you need to have a completely custom from the ground up built tech stack. I am I'm almost looking at it as a I'm like the conductor of a symphony or an orchestra. uh you know trying to bring together a bunch of different puzzle pieces and um uh you know operate at a at a higher level. Uh you know we have obviously Shopify uh as our commerce platform. We have RFID deployed into all of our stores. We have email and text messaging and advertising and data feeds and AI now that we need to plug into different parts of the organization. Um our retail business is absolutely taking off and so there's a bunch of interesting kind of retail physical technology challenges that are out there to solve. So I'm certainly thinking bigger picture. I don't want to be um standing on my own farmer stack and I Farhan handle all of those problems and I stand on top of his shoulders uh on days like today uh and make sure that we're operating at you know the best efficiency possible here.

How much can you tell us how much

Oh yeah.

Sorry I was saying can you tell us how today's going for you?

Yeah, it's going great. Uh we have set multiple records in terms of orders per hour. I think we're on our sixth straight hour of uh breaking that uh record there.

Six straight hours.

Yeah. Uh which is fantastic. Um obviously Black Friday is always our biggest day of the year and we're seeing some fantastic growth uh year-over-year. Uh and everything's uh running great. Farhan did a great job uh with systems on his side.

You don't keep the the notifications on the push notifications on the Shopify app anymore. [laughter] When did

I mean I had to turn those off like nine and a half years ago at this point. Uh it's been a long time since I had the little uh the bell on my phone going off there.

Where uh where are you getting leverage uh from AI on the engineering side? Are you using it to spin up landing pages faster? Like where where's the mo where are you getting an edge there? How

we're actually we're actually doing exactly that. Uh my entire engineering team also is using cursor and cloud and a few different tools to to be more efficient on that front. Uh we also just deployed a tool um here in retail called Invent AI. Uh and it's designed to optimize uh all of our retail inventory for all of our weekly transfer orders and replenishments that we need to do to all of our retail stores. So it's doing uh a bunch of things for us that used to take three or four people uh a couple of days to bring together in spreadsheets now at our scale. And we've completely optimized that now um with an AI system that we've been seeing some great leverage on here as we've brought up at the holidays. So what about customer service there?

Yeah. What about customer service? Have you because I feel like there's the natural progression of you know you have some uh knowledge base then you have a whole bunch of back and forth in emails like smart email responses. Uh what are you doing there?

Yeah our CX team our CX team has been working hard on our AI assistant agent on the website. Our ticket volume that actually is making to humans is down significantly year-over-year. Our CX team and our Black Friday channels actually hey things are going really smooth this year. Uh, and part of that's because we've been able to offload uh a bunch of those requests directly um to that agent. And so that's been super valuable for that team to be lean and efficient during our biggest time of year.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Uh what's your uh if you can share this, what's your what's your biggest store by volume?

Uh I'm sitting in it here. Austin Congress is definitely our biggest store. Nashville will give it a run for its money. um uh depending on the day, depending on the country music concert that might be going on. Uh but our flagship here in Austin is is our is our largest.

And is it is it twi is it like twice as much from a gross revenue standpoint as say like a Manhattan or or is it is it closer?

That's a good question. Yeah. So Soho, we've been we've only been open for about three months now in Soho. So that's still a relatively new market for us um as we're growing and investing kind of up into the northeast of the country. And we're super excited about that. Soho store. It's an incredible uh and honestly I think it's probably our our best store we ever built. Um and we've kind of taken

it's beautiful in here like the deep the floorboards for example Lee like it is really spectacular. Can you actually talk about what your issue with opening these stores and like the free bar issue because I I think I think the boys would love to hear like that issue.

Yeah. I can't actually say that we have alcohol in every store. Uh, and there are some menus that are slightly curated um, uh, in certain markets because, uh, we actually run into issues with certain, uh, city councils, uh, and kind of legalities in that area where they don't really have like a license for a retail store to offer hospitality, liquor, and a shopping experience without food also being served. And so, uh, we've had to get creative in some cases. We've had to actually, uh, spend some time with different city councils in other cases. Um, and it's just

let me explain how we do things around this retail store.

Well, it just the reason I love that story is because the like the the the genius of of Tobas and business models like this is that the traditional kind of city councils, they can't put them into any box. They don't know what to call them. Like the traditional like it's a store or it's a place to hang or it's saloon or it's a place to come and just like, you know, get get your uh get your boot shine. Like they can figure out what they are. And I think that's I think business models that are difficult to explain in that way usually the ones that are most interesting.

Yep.

What's what's been your guys' policy around uh using AI on the on the content side? Any any strong opinions or kind of guidelines that you've been following? We've been asking some other other founders.

That's a good question.

Um we we have not gotten to the point where we have um deployed any AI produced content into any of our ads or creative. certainly used it to help brainstorm and come up with ideas of how things could look or, you know, get some some storyboards or things like that. We haven't gone all the way off like the Coca-Cola rails here and like a weird AI ad. That's

that's not uh that's not something that uh we want to get to right now. We think the ads that we have right now are fantastic. We've actually got an ad that's probably airing right now in the Georgia Tech game. We've got an ad tonight in the Texas Tech event end games. Um and those ads like have storytelling elements to them. They're super gritty. uh they fit real naturally into like Land Man and Yellowstone and some of the other uh big uh commercial brands that we're sponsoring and being a part of. Um and we we are we couldn't be more happier with uh what we're doing right now from a creative perspective.

Uh I'm curious how how much is uh counterfeiting an issue for you guys because we are now dealing with counterfeiting. We just saw this morning somebody included a TVPN merch in a gift guide that they were doing. It's not we don't we haven't sold uh we haven't sold any merch ourselves, but people are making counterfeit uh goods. I'm sure you guys have have a bunch of issues with that, but I wonder what the approach is.

I mean, I feel like I need a knock on wood right now. It's not a huge problem we're dealing with physically. We do see it more digitally with like ripoff sites and scam sites that kind of pop up around the web and even the dark web. Yeah.

Yeah. And so we've got a partner named Bolster who helps monitor uh those uh kind of site developments in real time. They also help issue takedown notices and bring those things down as fast as possible. Um, and really since we we probably started using that tool now three years ago. Um, and it's something that I I don't really even have to think about too much now because it's just up and running and and serving as our frontline defense.

That's great. We probably need to sign up for that.

Yeah, we need

Can you talk a little bit about um sort of this the like you guys are how many stores you have now?

40.

Yeah. Wow.

The pace the p I mean that's unbelievable. the pace you guys are opening right now is kind of unbelievable. Um, can you talk a bit about how the relationship you have? Like I think it'd be valuable for for those listening and watching just how you think about like channels and like you know traditionally you think of channel conflict online's hurting offline. With cowboy boots you kind of want to go into the store first to try it on but subsequent purchases maybe can be down the line. You have a very I I think a really great way to kind of think about that and how you think about expansion. Can you talk about how when you sit around and you think about where to go, how to expand, what what channels are producing, how you guys look at all that?

Yeah, totally. So, you know, we started only as DDC. So, we're website only for five or six years. And we got into retail, I think like uh it was December before COVID, which is a terrible time to start retail business. Um, and basically open eight stores and immediately closed them. Uh, but we kind of survived. We survived uh obviously that year and it came back super super strong from that. You you mentioned cowboy boots. It's a very unique firsttime purchase for someone who has never purchased a cowboy boot before and can even be slightly intimidating. And so having a brickandmortar retail store to come in and get that experience, get that fitting, kind of understand how that boot is supposed to feel when you're wearing it is a massive unlock for us as a brand. Uh today our retail business is larger than our ecom business. Um both are super healthy, but retail is actually scaling even faster.

Uh so we're seeing uh fantastic results here. actually see when we open a new retail store in a new market, we may actually see ecom dip just slightly when that store opens because there's so many customers who wanted to go to the store uh because they've been waiting so long to actually have that experience um uh in real life which is uh I think a unique attribute of ours obviously the whole the whole market lifts over time which is great. Um and then we've also just recently started part uh partnering with with specific wholesalers. So, we see a great opportunity to go outside just of our direct channels um and meet the customer where they're at. Cowboy boots have been around for 150 years, and there's lots of great independent Western dealers out there that we're excited to get our products into. And we certainly don't look at it as as channel conflict. If we can get someone in the cowboy boot, we don't care what channel it comes from. And we know over time we're going to lift the whole market. So, uh we don't

Are you taking market share from anyone? Are you taking market share from a different company or is it like non-conumption you're competing with?

Yeah. I I mean I don't want to talk bad about anybody Harley, but there's only one line here uh today on South Congress, but there are multiple boot shops here uh [laughter] on the street.

Shot in Soho. There's not that many boot shops. [laughter]

All Star is the most crowded.

What about What about international? Are you guys thinking about uh like what country do you think will buy more C or could could come close to buying cowboy boots at at the level that uh uh Americans?

Yeah, that's that's a good question. We still have not tapped international at all. So we are still United States only. Uh and still we think we have a very large green field um internationally. Uh if you look at markets like Canada and Australia and Brazil and Mexico and Spain, there's Germany even has a has a has a pretty big TAM there. So um we think there's a great opportunity for us to continue to expand internationally, but we also want to do it in a thoughtful way. We want to do it in a profitable way. um and make sure that uh you know it's the right decision for us to go that direction on your new

makes a lot of sense. Got anything else?

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you for taking the time. You you seem like you're just uh cruising through the world.

He is like he's steady getting things crazy but

throw the boots on the desk and just enjoy the rest of the day.

CTO who's on Shopify like it's not going [laughter]

it's this is my Harley. This is my 10th Black Friday on Shopify. So, um, it's, uh, you know, we've come a long way and things are going really well.

That's awesome. This is my 16th Black Friday. Almost half my life. This is great. Yeah. Honestly, I'm not just saying this, Kevin, because you're on the call, but like, you'd be so proud. The store, the staff here are doing amazing. You can feel the energy. People are just hanging out in the front. There are people that are having um, you know, their their shoes, their boots personalized. You got a lineup of people drinking bourbon here. you like as from one entr to another man like you should be really proud of this.

Okay, last question.

We got one more question for you. We got to ask. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught, Kevin?

You know, I heard the last question you asked that. I mean, I think I probably caught maybe like a a 5B catfish.

Okay.

Okay. Catfish.

Nothing wrong with that.

That's on brand. Catfish. We actually

Did you eat the catfish? I feel like if you catch

No, it was it was a catch and release situation. Okay,

there you go. First catfish and put it back.

That's the first catfish. We need to start putting them up on the wall when we have different fish catch. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us on such a busy day. Happy Black Friday.

Yeah, I appreciate

Thank you for the wonderful boots. See you soon.

Cheers.

Look at that. Oh,

$4.2 a million dollar in sales every minute, right? Isn't that it?

Or millions per minute. Wow. That is a uh a fantastic amount. Um well, let me