How Tecovas Is Aligning Performance Marketing With Long-Term Brand Storytelling

To sell a $300 pair of boots, Tecovas spends a surprising amount of time trying not to sell them. The Western lifestyle brand invests heavily in long-form storytelling and creative work that explores its roots and builds deeper customer connection, including a Super Bowl spot, a Jeff Nichols short film premiered at SXSW, and even a full month of October emails with no product link. Behind those efforts is a marketing system designed to support sustained investment in brand, allowing the company to operate with a different cadence than most direct-to-consumer players.

Krista Dalton, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Tecovas, brings a background shaped by both scale and speed. Over the course of her career, she has led marketing and customer experience efforts at major retailers, balancing brand ambition with operational execution. At Target, she managed a $450 million omnichannel P&L, where she saw how brand strength is built and maintained at scale. At Overstock.com, she led a 1,300-person organization and drove 20% topline growth in a $4 billion business. Today, she brings those lessons together at Tecovas, combining long-term brand thinking with a more agile, performance-driven approach.

"I think of performance marketing as funding the creative. You need to get more efficient at the ROI-heavy areas in order to find money to go elsewhere. Their efficiency is paramount in order to decouple us from the necessity of performance marketing," says Dalton. Her team operates with a high level of discipline around return on ad spend, applying the same operational focus she developed at Overstock.com to create room for broader creative investment. With a lean, two-person team, they focus on continuous optimization, using tools like Lily AI to improve ROAS by roughly 10% year over year. Dalton also prioritizes hands-on experimentation, recently pausing meetings for a week to give the team space for an "AI deep dive." The team has also built internal systems to support scale, including a tool that scans social inboxes and flags priority outreach to enable personalized responses across thousands of daily messages.

• Transparently fake: Dalton sets clear boundaries between how Tecovas uses AI internally and what customers see. As some brands navigate shifting consumer attitudes toward authenticity and AI-generated content, Tecovas skips AI entirely for customer-facing creative. Generative tools stay on the back end for efficiency, analytics, and workflow. The only exception is on social media, where posts must be obviously artificial and played for humor, like a Thanksgiving image featuring six turkeys and twelve hands, so customers know exactly who they are talking to. "I never want the customer to feel tricked by what we're putting out," she emphasizes.

• Cowboys, not creators: That standard of authenticity applies across the board. For its first Super Bowl appearance, the company chose not to shoot a brand-new spot despite having the budget to do so. Instead, it ran an existing, actor-free film built around real Western wearers, using the game as a chance to introduce the brand to millions of viewers during a closely watched streaming event. The spot was shot on location with no AI involvement, mirroring the company’s emphasis on handcrafted boots with handcrafted storytelling. "We actually had a budget to shoot an entirely new spot, but we decided to run that one because our head of creative doesn't want models doing cowboy things," notes Dalton, "and he doesn't want cowboys doing actor things."

Balancing short-term performance with long-term brand investment can create pressure in highly performance-driven environments. Dalton approaches that challenge with measurement. She runs regional holdout tests that temporarily pause upper-funnel activity in specific markets, allowing her team to quantify the revenue impact when awareness disappears. At the same time, her scope across both marketing and digital helps maintain a unified view of the customer journey, reducing the fragmentation that often shows up in channel-specific teams.

• The eight-week window: Dalton approaches the funnel as a connected system and, to support that view, her team built a customer data platform that tags how visitors arrive and tracks behavior over an eight-week window. The extended view helps surface value that isn’t visible on a first visit, giving the team a clearer understanding of how decisions unfold over time. "That helped give us a full funnel approach of what's the true value of this customer, not just the day that they arrive," she explains. "Who makes the decision to buy a $300 boot in twelve minutes? Very few people. But if they give themselves eight weeks to show their girlfriends, their husband, their guy friends, and their wife, then we're very happy."

• Story led: Those insights shape how Tecovas approaches lifecycle marketing. One of the company’s OKRs was to become "a company of excellent storytellers," which guided teams to expand beyond purely transactional messaging. That direction showed up in a month-long email series focused on educating customers about Tecovas’ factory in Mexico and its generational tannery workers. The content emphasized learning and brand context, even with the expectation that it would generate fewer immediate conversions than product-focused campaigns. "My head of performance marketing pointed out the dollar amount that we're probably going to lose because we're not landing on a PDP for each of these emails," Dalton notes. "And that was such a great moment to have a conversation with her about why this KPI is different."

With no sales pressure in the email series, customers reached out directly, thanking the brand for focusing on storytelling rather than pushing a purchase. The same philosophy carries through beyond the inbox. Tecovas extends that experience into the post-purchase journey, sharing guidance on how to care for different leathers and encouraging customers to bring boots into stores for free shines, reinforcing the idea of long-term ownership. It also influences how the brand shows up in physical retail. Stores are designed around what Tecovas calls "radical hospitality," with details like the smell of leather, boot care services, complimentary drinks, and space for customers to spend time with the product.

• Priority pillars: To keep that ethos intact as the company grows, the leadership team aligned early on three core brand pillars and turned them into a decision filter. Those pillars, including radical hospitality, empower everyone from store associates to paid media leads to evaluate whether initiatives match the brand or come across as too transactional. "When I started here, the leadership team really aligned on three key pillars of who we are as a brand," says Dalton. "What I empowered my team to do was say yes and say no to opportunities that align with who we are. Radical hospitality is a promise that we make, and if we feel like we're becoming transactional, everyone from a store associate to my head of CRM to my head of paid is empowered to say so."

• Local personality: As Tecovas grows to 60 stores, the brand carries that same philosophy into its retail footprint. Local teams have flexibility in how they engage with their communities, including support for the arts, a perspective also shapes site selection. Rather than applying a uniform national model, the brand prioritizes locations that reflect the character of the surrounding area. Dalton points to the Detroit location in the historic Woodward Building as an example of joining an established neighborhood rather than simply opening a new storefront. "When we opened our Detroit store, we got to be part of the revival in the area," she says. "I'm very excited about how thoughtful the team is on the locations that we're in."

On the omnichannel side, Dalton highlights a lack of "channel ego" across the executive team. With ship-from-store and real-time inventory visibility in place, ecommerce and retail teams share product fluidly to ensure customers can find what they need, regardless of how they choose to shop. This same mindset carries into how the brand approaches creators. Audience expectations play a central role, particularly among Gen Z consumers who are increasingly attuned to authenticity. As a result, Tecovas focuses on working with individuals who already have a natural connection to the product. "I don't want people in boots who don't wear them because it's so clear and uncomfortable," Dalton concludes. "We want to reach people who authentically love what we do. Trying to get people who actually want to wear our boots, in our boots, is the key."