Country singer Crystal Gayle is twirling around on her cowboy boot–clad feet when the two young sisters spot her. She’s a flurry of sparkles and kicked-up dust at the Houston Rodeo, and the starry-eyed sisters can’t look away. “That’s when it imprinted on us,” said Sarah Caruth, who owns Fraulein Boot Company with her sister, Margaret Walker. “We thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what is this Western wonderment?’ ”
Legacy cowboy boot companies such as Tony Lama and Justin Boots have always catered to both men and women styles, but women-owned boot companies like Fraulein are prioritizing unapologetically feminine styles. With daring bright colors and girly patterns, a rising class of female boot designers are shaping soles for the cowgirls of the future.
The elder stateswoman of the group is Lizzy Bentley, who founded City Boots in 2015. Her bestsellers include a pastel-pink boot emblazoned with a protective evil eye, and a mint green stunner with lightning bolts inspired by the Amalfi Coast. This June, she expanded from Fort Worth and Houston to a new Austin showroom, which she celebrated with a boot collection inspired by the capital city. (There’s a Rainey boot and a Congress boot for locals looking to represent.) In a conversation at Soho House Austin, Bentley rose above the current Western fashion craze. “I’m designing something that I want to be on your shelf twenty years from now, so I try to stay with a more traditional [look],” she said. “This is really a heritage product that can be handed down. It’s really not a trend.”
The San Antonio–based sisters behind Fraulein also pay homage to tradition. Both women are Texan to their core: Mark White, their uncle, was the forty-third governor of Texas and their mother taught Texas history. (The company’s name comes from Bobby Helms’ “Fraulein,” which their dad would sing around the campfire.) But they don’t let their love for Lone Star classics hold back their designs, which they describe as “funky cowgirl.”
In traditional bootmaking, they explain, patterns are mirrored on each shoe with not much differentiating the two other than right and left. Fraulein gets a little more modern: on the Sneaky Snake, the animal slithers from one boot to the other. The Roadrunner, inspired by Caruth’s Enid Collins purse from her childhood, displays two different Texas icons: a roadrunner and an agave plant in bloom. The sisters are big believers in a “statement boot”—they often include a small detail along the counter, or the back lower part of the boot just atop the heel. The rose on Horse Girl and the rising sun on Sunshine (inspired by Willie Nelson’s “Bring Me Sunshine”) are designed to peek out from underneath a cropped pant.
The sisters describe their sensibility as “original vintage”—a little of the old and a little of the new. “We wanted [our boots] to look and feel like the old ones and kind of bring back that nostalgia of being in a honky-tonk with sawdust on the floor,” Caruth said.
The duo jumped in feet first to the industry in 2021 after Caruth lost her job in medical device sales. “We joked that it’s our midlife crisis business,” she said. “It’s a joke, but it’s kind of real.” In classic Texan woman style, come hell or high water, they were going to make their business happen. “One very important thing for us was to not lean on our husbands financially to secure the seed money to get started and not to take an investor,” Caruth said. “We got a small loan from our bank with the help of our mother cosigning, which we paid back way before it was due. . . . She has always believed in us and support has helped us believe in ourselves.”
Within six months of committing to the idea of starting a company, the sisters had Fraulein boots on the ground and went to Round Top for their first show. “We just had our samples. We had no boots for people to put on their feet unless they were a size seven,” Caruth said. “We sold like twenty preorders and were like okay, this is going to work.” Then, the true mark of success came through: a friend wore Fraulein boots to ACL, and reported that she “walked over ten miles and [the boots] were like a second skin,” Walker says. As avid festivalgoers know, this is the highest praise for footwear.
North of Fraulein HQ, in Dallas, stay-at-home mother Kelsey Crain spotted a crucial gap in the cowboy boot market. In 2021, she scoured shops and sites for matching mommy-and-me boots and came up short. Instead, she ended up painting her toddler daughter’s boots pink to match her own. A lightbulb moment came at the State Fair of Texas, after several moms approached her asking where she bought the boots. By 2022, Crain had founded Petite Paloma.
“Maybe we test the market and see if that’s something that people would want,“ she recounted of those early days. “Because I know that if I want it, I’m not that original or that unique of a person. . . . I know other people are going to want it too.” Now, Crain leans into the familial aspect of the business whenever possible. “All of our boots are named after daughters, like my daughter and then my nieces. And then once I ran out of that, I went to my friends’ daughters,” she says.
In keeping with the family-friendly sentiment, Crain chose a very specific factory in León, Mexico, to have her designs made into reality. In a male-dominated industry, especially within the factories, the point person for all of their business needs is “the daughter,” Crain says.
Crain’s ultra-girly designs, available in sizes for adults, toddlers, kids, and “big kids,” often look as though they’ve come right off the pages of an illustrated storybook. For the Isla boot, for example, Crain, originally from Florida, was inspired by her childhood love of Palm Beach. She lined the shaft of the boot with palm trees and chose a bubblegum pink base color that sets off the green of the trees and the tropical birds flying around them. It comes only in adult sizes (though it would match nicely with these pastel pink kids’ boots), but they might inspire the wearer to tap into the colors and shapes of their own childhoods. They might even, say, set off a feeling of Western wonderment in two little girls.
In a full circle moment, Crystal Gayle recently followed Fraulein on Instagram. She bestowed upon those starry-eyed sisters one of the greatest compliments a designer could receive: “You’re bringing beauty into the world.”
