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URBAN COWBOY

PINTO RANCH BRINGS UPSCALE WESTERN WEAR TO TRENDY CITY FOLK

By Maura K. Ammenheuser

Texas is one of those places where country and western music thrives. It is also home to a retail concept that might well be described as "city and western."

Clothing and accessories retailer Pinto Ranch, which sells high-end, handmade cowboy boots and hats and other apparel as well as jewelry, art and gifts, opened its first store in 2004 in Houston, a mile from upscale retail palace Houston Galleria. And though no one expects Pinto Ranch customers will be parking their horses outside, the 11,000-square-foot store contains a working tack shop where saddles are repaired. The Pinto Ranch design resembles a Western lodge, with exposed wooden beams, wrought-iron furniture and earth tones.

The privately owned retailer opened a second, 9,000-square-foot store in November in Dallas, in the recently expanded, 1.9 million-square-foot NorthPark Center. "You don't feel like you're in a mall," said CEO Walter Pye Jr. "Unless you're in the store you really can't get the feeling of what we created."

Yet even inside the store, a non-Texan might be a tad confused. Tack shop or no tack shop, Pinto Ranch's audience is quite urban. "It's really not the working cowboy," said Pye. "It's a combination of people who have ranches: a lot of lawyers, doctors and bankers who have ranches and do a lot of work on weekends out there."

In NorthPark Pinto Ranch sits between a Barneys New York and a Neiman Marcus - hardly the place to find a dusty cowboy hauling a worn saddle pulled from his pickup. But the store is already drawing people from Fort Worth and from small towns north of Dallas that Pye describes as "horse country." The Houston boutique, by contrast, draws locals and tourists who "want a little piece of Americana," Pye said. "They can't get that everywhere."

Christine Szalay, NorthPark's marketing director, recalls the Brazilian tourist who visited the new Pinto Ranch over the holidays and bought a $5,000 hat, a $4,000 buckle and a $400 belt. Little wonder, then, that Pye concludes that "our strength is in the apparel - the boots, the belts, the buckles," rather than in the tack shop.

Indeed, Szalay says Pinto Ranch draws a few "real" cowboys, but mostly just fashion-oriented city slickers. "This is really about a fashion perspective and a sense of Western style," she said. Many Texan men wear boots with business suits, she points out. In the wealthy Houston market, many people favor custom-made boots, says Lindsey Brown, marketing director of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Houston has an annual rodeo, a three-week extravaganza that runs in March. "When it's rodeo week, it's ‘Go, cowboy!' " said Debbie Westbelt, Uptown Houston's director of economic development. "This is the perfect market for them."

Pye would not discuss precise revenues, nor would he identify any Pinto Ranch investors by name, beyond a general reference to himself and some friends and relatives. Pye says the Houston store's sales last year rose 16 percent over the previous year's, which in turn were up 20 percent over the year before.

Some Houston competitors - Palace Boot Shop and Crazy Ranch Designs, have closed, and, in fact, the very idea for Pinto Ranch grew out of the closure of yet another store. Pye comes from a retailing family in Houston, and several years ago he and a partner helped Stelzig's, a 125-year-old local Western store, liquidate its inventory when the owner sold. In the process, Pye says, he realized that Western wear was "a great niche." For three years he researched brands and vendors. Pinto Ranch is named for an actual Wyoming ranch owned by some of his investors.

This being Texas, though, other sources of Western garb do exist. Dallas residents could travel to Fort Worth, Pye says. As for Houston, Boot Town Western Wear has a handful of stores, and the family-run Cavender's Boot City and Cavender's Western Outfitters operates some 40 stores throughout Texas and also in Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. But those chains serve the middle market, with their "basic," self-service-style stores, says Dan Smith, senior vice president of Levcor, a Houston-based developer that runs the open-air Post Oak Plaza, where the first Pinto Ranch opened. Boot Town and Cavender's do well, but there is a niche of consumers who want better goods, says Pye.

Szalay says Pinto Ranch is atypical in that its strong fashion sense sets it apart. "You walk in and have a whole different feel," Szalay said. "It's an incredible store."

Pye declines to predict how large the Pinto Ranch chain could grow, but he did say that expansion will come slowly. At a cost of $3 million to $4 million to open, he says he will bring out one or two stores annually over the next few years. He says he sees markets in Arizona, California, Chicago, Colorado and New York for his shops, which require at least 7,000 square feet. As for venues, Pye says, that depends. "We prefer buying the real estate," he said. Established, upscale regional malls that are a major destination, such as NorthPark, are ideal, he says, but the easy access of some open-air centers make those a good fit too.

Meanwhile, business at Pinto Ranch's first store can only be helped by Levcor's renovation of the Post Oak Plaza facade, which includes upgraded lighting, and by plans to bring in several new tenants this year, including Panera Bread Company and Whole Earth Provisions, says Smith. Across the street another developer is building a large mixed-use project that is likely to add apartments and offices to the area.

Observers see few problems for Pinto Ranch, though Smith and Brown point out that the Houston store has seasonal customers. Smith says Pinto Ranch's busiest season is December through March. The closest working ranch is in Richmond, 45 minutes away, and in Houston "it's rare to see people decked out in cowboy gear outside rodeo," said Brown.

But even people who do not wear cowboy hats every day do wear buckles daily and boots often, says Pye, making for a year-round business on the whole. He says he is unconcerned about the economy, despite presiding over a specialized boutique that sells pricey goods. "I've been through many business cycles," he said, insisting that if one waits for an ideal time to take a risk, one misses a lot of opportunities.

Pinto Ranch is debt free, having financed itself internally. Thus, should things slow for a year, there will be no pressure to open units, Pye says. "We're more interested in building a lifestyle."