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

Summary

Tecovas CTO Kevin Harwood reported record-breaking sales performance on Black Friday 2025, with the brand logging six consecutive hours of new orders-per-hour records across both its online and physical channels. Speaking from the Austin South Congress flagship, Harwood noted a queue of roughly 50 people waiting outside from open, with comparable crowd density reported at the SoHo location, which has only been open approximately three months.

Retail is now Tecovas' largest channel, having surpassed e-commerce, with both segments described as healthy but physical retail scaling faster. The brand launched retail in December 2019, immediately opened and closed eight stores during COVID, then rebuilt aggressively to reach 45 stores today. Harwood observes a consistent pattern when entering new markets: e-commerce dips briefly at store opening as customers who had been waiting shift to in-person purchases, before the total market lifts across both channels.

Tecovas recently added wholesale partnerships to its direct channels, positioning them as complementary rather than conflicting. The rationale is straightforward: a first cowboy boot purchase is tactile and often intimidating for new buyers, making physical retail a meaningful conversion tool, while repeat purchases flow more freely online.

International expansion remains entirely untapped. Harwood identifies Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Germany as credible markets with meaningful TAM, but says the brand wants to expand profitably and deliberately rather than move fast.

AI and Technology

Harwood describes his CTO role as conductor rather than builder, deliberately not maintaining a proprietary commerce stack. Tecovas runs on Shopify (Harwood's tenth Black Friday on the platform), with RFID deployed across all 45 stores, and a growing layer of AI tools across the business.

The most operationally significant AI deployment is Invent AI, a retail inventory optimization system now handling weekly transfer orders and replenishment across all stores. Work that previously required three to four people and several days of spreadsheet consolidation is now automated, with Harwood citing meaningful leverage heading into the holiday period.

On the engineering side, the team uses Cursor and Claude for development efficiency. Customer service AI has driven a significant year-over-year reduction in tickets reaching human agents, with the CX team reporting an unusually smooth Black Friday load.

Tecovas has deliberately kept AI out of its advertising creative. Harwood draws an explicit line at AI-generated ad content, citing the brand's current campaign aesthetic as high-quality storytelling that fits naturally alongside sponsorships of Landman, Yellowstone, and live sports including a Texas Tech game airing that evening.

Brand and Store Experience

Tecovas operates what Harwood calls Radical Hospitality across its retail footprint. All stores offer open bars, on-site boot branding with heated branding irons and blowtorches, and boot shine stations. The model has created friction with some local authorities: certain city councils lack a licensing framework for a retail store that serves alcohol without a food component, requiring Tecovas to negotiate with regulators market by market and adapt menus where necessary.

On brand protection, Tecovas uses Bolster to monitor and issue takedown notices against counterfeit and scam sites, including dark web activity. Harwood says the tool has been running for approximately three years and now requires minimal active management.