Ahead of rodeo season, Chisos Boot Company is releasing a new run of the Chisos Reserve: Anniversary Edition, a small-batch cowboy boot built from wild-harvested Texas alligator. The release marks one of the few windows the company opens each year for its rarest boot, reflecting its position in the luxury bootmaking market.
The cowboy boot market divides into three tiers: work boots on automated lines, fast-fashion Western labels like Tecovas, and bench-made heritage makers. Chisos competes in the top tier with construction and materials. The Anniversary Edition, first released in 2020, is the only small-batch cowboy boot exclusively made from wild Texas alligator. Each pair is mirror-cut from royal black alligator belly, wild-harvested from East Texas waters, with several hides hunted personally by founder Will Roman. No two pairs are alike. The collar features a hand-tooled, hand-dyed relief of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park. Each pair retails for $4,950.
The harvest follows a conservation model: regulated wild harvest gives Texas landowners a financial reason to protect wetlands. The project is certified by the nonprofit Texan by Nature. “Landowners are key to protecting alligator breeding habitat,” Roman said. “Using the leather as a model for financing conservation is the reason these animals were able to flourish again.”
The Anniversary Edition sits at the top of an exotic range that begins with the Chisos No. 7 Lizard, a black-lizard suit boot retailing for $945. Both boots are built on the same foundation: bench-made construction with vegetable-tanned leather components, Goodyear welt construction, and a proprietary removable comfort insole. “We build the way bootmakers built a century ago,” Roman said. “A Chisos boot is meant to be the last pair a man buys, and the first thing his son inherits.”
Every Chisos boot is built at a family-run workshop in Guanajuato, Mexico. Heritage leathers are hand-selected from regional dairy-cow hides, and exotics are sourced from respected suppliers or harvested by Chisos. The company, based in Austin, Texas, was founded in 2019 and named for the Chisos Mountains. A portion of every sale supports Texas land conservation. Learn more at https://chisos.com.
