In El Paso, a Boot Workshop Is Training the Next Pair of Hands

This month, Garden & Gun published a look inside Lucchese's boot workshop in El Paso, and tucked into it was a genuinely good piece of news: with the pool of skilled leatherworkers in El Paso shrinking in recent years, the company is opening an apprentice school right inside the plant — starting with fancy stitching, then moving discipline by discipline through the rest of the bootmaking process. In other words, instead of letting a craft drift away from the town that built it, they're teaching it to new hands, on site, in the same rooms where the boots get made.

What's happening on the factory floor

If you've never thought about what it takes to make a cowboy boot the old way, the numbers are humbling. Lucchese's El Paso production facility holds sixty thousand square feet of sewing machines, buffing wheels, and bins of cut leather — a space one company director calls "the world's largest cobbler shop". The brand makes the majority of its boots there, carrying out the bulk of the work by hand. And it is genuinely a village effort: the sounds of 240 people stitching, sanding, and tapping blend into a steady, low buzz, and each pair passes through at least 180 different people on its way to completion.

One hundred and eighty people. Per pair. Let that reframe whatever you were going to complain about at work today.

Why an apprentice school matters

Handwork like this doesn't survive on nostalgia. It survives when somebody younger stands next to somebody older long enough to pick up what can't be written down. El Paso maintains a long leatherworking tradition, but the pool of skilled workers arriving at the company's door has shrunk in recent years — the quiet kind of problem that hollows out a trade one retirement at a time. An in-house school is the honest fix: you stop waiting for trained hands to show up, and you start making them.

That's the part of this story worth carrying around on a bad day. A big workshop looked at a shrinking craft and decided the answer was to teach, stitch by stitch, in the same building where the work happens.

El Paso's long leather tradition

El Paso has been a leather town for generations, and this is what it looks like when a place decides to stay one. The boots coming off that floor aren't souvenirs of a tradition — they're the tradition itself, continued. It's the same reason we put so much Texas on our shirts: the state's best stuff is made by people who stayed put and kept at it. If that's your kind of thing, our Texas collection was built in that spirit.

What you can do about it

If you're anywhere near far West Texas, El Paso rewards the trip — and there's something grounding about standing in a city where a craft this old is actively being handed forward. Buy boots made by actual hands when you can afford to. Tell a kid you know that "fancy stitching" is a real job title in Texas, because apparently it is. And if you want to wear your allegiance while you break in a new pair, the Texas State Pride Tee goes with boots. Everything goes with boots.

Common questions

Where did this story come from?

It's from a feature in Garden & Gun's October/November 2026 issue, published in mid-October, which went inside Lucchese's El Paso production facility.

Are the boots really made by hand?

Largely, yes. The company makes the majority of its boots at the El Paso facility, carrying out the bulk of the work by hand, and each pair passes through at least 180 different people before it's done.

What exactly is the apprentice school?

It's a training program the company is opening inside the plant — starting with fancy stitching, then moving discipline by discipline through the rest of the bootmaking process — a way to rebuild the local pool of skilled leatherworkers rather than watch it shrink.

Reported by Garden & Gun. Details as published at the time of writing.