Sorry, Texas, but we just have to reveal your darling bespoke boot designer, Miron Crosby, to the rest of the South. Equal parts whimsical and luxurious, the exclusive designs of Miron Crosby have garnered a swarm of attention from their West Texas home that extends to both coasts. The boot brand has a flagship shop in Dallas’s Highland Park Village, a new sister shop in Aspen, Colorado, and no plans of stopping there.
Miron Crosby was born and bred on the Texas dirt, just like its founders, sisters Lizzie Means Duplantis and Sarah Means. (We’re all about sister design duos lately!) “We grew up quite rurally on a working cattle ranch in West Texas,” Lizzie says. “We laugh that we didn’t have many neighbors. We were sort of forced to make our own fun together from a young age, and we’ve been dreaming together since then.”
The pair used to build forts in the creek and dream up ways to torture their brother Coley. Now, they dream up boot designs. “We’re still thinking of ways to torture our brother Coley,” Sarah adds. “We’ve always been a pair at play.” And this pair continues to wow us with pair after pair of never-want-to-take-them-off boots.
They followed their cattle ranch childhood with a move to New York City, where high fashion and vibrant color began to mix with their Western authenticity and grit. After a new design is realized in the New York studio, it comes to life back in Mercedes, TX. Rios of Mercedes — a name that should ring some bells if you know your boots — is an iconic 160-year-old boot manufacturer with a factory drenched in crawling ivy.
Rios is owned and operated by cousins of the Means sisters, so they have access to master boot artisans who can bring their inventive designs to life. For each boot design, an experienced master artisan selects luxurious leathers and exotic skins, then cuts, lasts (a “last” is a solid structure shaped like a foot used to form and construct a pair of boots), and stitches every pair by hand.
Like the custom bespoke hat trend we see everywhere, boot buyers are flocking to the in-store experience of customizing a pair of Miron Crosby boots. And few bootmakers offer a service as intricately tailored to each customer as Miron Crosby’s.
Once you’ve picked your style, colors, and materials, you can add a monogram, ranch brand, logo, or other meaningful imagery. And it doesn’t stop there. Handwritten notes can even be transcribed onto leather and sewn into the lining of your boot.
Lizzie and Sarah’s great-grandfather, Marion Otis Means, was a true gentleman, a debonair, and a real cowman. “Miron” is a play on Marion, and “Crosby” is the name of a pasture on their family’s cattle ranch. The sisters also love exploring Crosby Street in NYC’s SoHo neighborhood for some trusty retail therapy and design inspiration.
“People always say, ‘Oh, I could never work with my sister, we’d fight constantly,'” Sarah says. “While we occasionally bicker, certainly, we also think folks miss the other half of that sentence. While it’s true nobody can drive you crazier than your sister, it’s also true that few people on the planet know you better or trust you more. There’s power in that,” she adds.
Work, play, and family tend to blur together for Sarah and Lizzie. “As cheesy as it sounds, we really are best friends,” Lizzie says, “so we spend lots of time together between work and play.” But the sisters had a serious conversation when Miron Crosby was in its infancy. “We made a pact to turn it off sometimes,” Sarah says. “When we need to chill and hang out and just be sisters, we’ll be intentional about that, and having that firewall sometimes is a lifesaver.”
The more we dug into the stories behind each design, the more impressed we became by the intention with which Lizzie and Sarah create. The Mansion Boot, for example, was born from a history deep-dive and extensive tour of the European influences found in the architecture of Dallas’s iconic Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek.
Miron Crosby also recently collaborated with a Dallas-based artist Stephanie Cooper Johnson who dreamed up some true one-of-a-kind painted boots with brightly-hued animals and florals. They also have a handsome line of men’s boots and “Mini Crosby” for kiddos. We cannot wait to see what Lizzie and Sarah dream up next. Keep up with Miron Crosby on Instagram.
Thanks to Lizzie and Sarah for sharing the Miron Crosby story with us — and Kristen Kilpatrick for the gorgeous photos.
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