🐴 How Kimes Ranch went from $0 to $15M+ with ZERO experience making jeans

What’s in store for today:

• Story: Kimes Ranch
• Framework: The Power of Branding
• Writing Prompt: What are 3 ways you can be more authentic in your business in 2025?
• Quote: read to the end to find out (it's one of my favorites)

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Excuses are the noose you hang yourself on on the road to “success”.

Here’s what I mean…

Two years ago I decided I wanted to learn how to book bind.

Did I know literally anything about book binding? Nope.

But I had an internet connection, a spare room, and lots of grit.

Many hours, papercuts and tear-filled meltdowns later, I’d produced this:

I not only taught myself a new skill, but I’m proud of what I created.

Building a business is no different.

In today’s edition of Western Writing Weekly, you’ll hear how one of the most recognizable brands in the western clothing industry began as an idea…with no skill set to back it up.

Where the founders quite literally had no idea how to get started.

From $0 to $15M+ in revenue per year, this brand didn’t let lack of knowledge or a major economic recession get in the way of their dream.

Let’s take a look…

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📕Story: Kimes Ranch

Matt and Amanda Kimes had zero experience in design, textiles, or production when they started Kimes Ranch in 2009.

Matt ran a finance business and Amanda was in wine distribution. Which according to her, she was terrible at because she drank all the inventory.

Matt’s business was tanking as a result of the Great Recession that began in 2008, and Amanda…well it’s hard to make a profit with no product.

So they did what any newly married couple does to guarantee lifelong happiness and security — they started a business together.

And because they had no experience in anything clothing related, they decided not to start with something super easy to break into and scale — jeans.

With that brilliant business plan decided, they opened up Google and began watching videos on how to make jeans.

An actual good decision they made was to narrow down what type of jeans they would make. Since they both grew up showing Quarter Horses, they picked “riding jeans”.

According to a promotional video on their YouTube channel, in Amanda’s words:

“Everybody knows who we are. We’ll just make jeans and take them to our core market, people that we’ve known forever, and why wouldn’t they wanna buy?”.

So that’s what they did.

Quit their jobs, bought rolls of denim and other sewing materials in the Garment District of Los Angeles, and because they couldn’t find a contractor to actually sew the jeans for them, that fell to Amanda.

Except, Amanda didn’t know how to sew.

Back to Google!

And when that failed…hire someone off Craigslist.

Six weeks and a bunch of money later, they had the world’s worst pair of jeans.

Amanda remembers trying them on at a Starbucks in downtown Scottsdale — they immediately ripped in the crotch. As a fun reminder of where they started, this very pair of jeans still hangs in their office today. It’s a reminder of just how far they’ve come.

With the world’s worst pair of (ripped) jeans in hand, they went back to the drawing board to try and find a new contractor to sew.

They researched online, came up with a list of 50 different names, and by the 30th call someone answered the phone. He remains their cutter to this day, and put them on to their current sewing facility and pattern maker, Leslie.

Leslie took one look at the Starbucks jeans and said, “I can do better”.

Three hours and $150 bucks later she was back with two patterns still in use today — the men’s Barney, and their most popular women’s jean — the Betty. They ended up making 300 pair from that first batch.

The next part of the plan: sell.

The idea was simple.

Matt and Amanda were headed to a horse show. And they were going to sell all the jeans there, turn around and make some more, and do it over and over again and make millions of dollars.

MUWAH HA HA!

Except they didn’t.

“We showed up and nobody cared. Not one person. Our friends took some and were like, ‘oh, very good, thank you’”.

But at the time they were making a product that was completely different than anything out there. It was higher rise, it was slimmer, it was darker denim. Everything at the time was super low rise on the women’s side, overprocessed on the men’s, crazy big and baggy. Matt describes it as:

“We took a huge leap over here and [people] they just wanted to be over there. They looked at our product and…they were very kind, but they didn’t want anything to do with it. That was one of our first obstacles. We were like, okay, well we can’t sell ‘em at horse shows, but I’m sure we can sell them at truck stops, swap meets, on the side of the road”.

They tried to sell the jeans for $10 over what they made them for.

The goal was to then take that money and go make adjustments and do it again. They even had a homemade cardboard sign made that said, “Come Try Jeans On In A Motor Home”.

So they’d park their motor home on the side of the highway as their friends drove by. It generated a few “what the heck are you doing?” phone calls.

In a promotional interview they joked with each other —

“I don’t understand why no one wanted to come into a creepy motor home and try on jeans?”

“Yeah, come on into our motor home. Try on our jeans. Totally reasonable. It’s legitimate.”

Nobody stopped.

They sat there all day, drank some beers, and went home.

Gettin' Out of Dodge

At some point, they decided the best thing to do was get away from where they lived.

Like Cheers, everyone in Scottsdale knew their name.

Neighbors wanted to be supportive, but at the end of the day, people didn’t know them for their new business. The Kimes’ realized they needed to go away and find a new market within the same niche that were willing to try something different.

They got back on the road, got out of Arizona and were going from rodeo to horse show and anywhere that would have them.

They sold their jeans one. at. a. time.

But making even one sale was a huge deal for the Kimes.

It meant they could go do dinner that night.

One of the events they did that year was the NFR (National Finals Rodeo) in Las Vegas.

Their goal was to sell 30 pair in a day. They told themselves if they could hit that number, they’d be killing it! And they would do 15 one day, and 12 the next. And then one day they hit 30.

They went out and celebrated that night — this time they felt like they’d really made it!

By this time, Matt and Amanda also had two more mouths to feed.

They started the company in March 2009. Amanda found out she was pregnant in May, and their first sone was born a year later in March. Their daughter came soon after the next September.

And because they had no money for childcare, the kids got loaded up in the motor home and traveled around with their parents as they tried to sell jeans.

A low point for Amanda came when they’d been on the road for so long, they pulled into a hotel parking lot with a restaurant inside. As they were walking through the parking lot to the restaurant to get dinner, their young son started crying, pointed to the hotel and said how badly he wanted to go home.

Devastated, Amanda realized that to her son, a hotel was “home”.

She remembers looking at Matt and saying, “we need to go home”. So they packed up, went home and tried to regroup.

From Broke to Broke-"er"

As anyone in the textile business will tell you, it takes a lot of capital to make denim.

It’s not like t-shirts or hats where you can just go grab a blank, put your logo on it and go sell your brand. With denim, you have to buy the denim, create the product from scratch, and make the product in certain sizes.

Especially in the equestrian market they chose, you can’t just put one product out in size 34 length and call it good.

You have to have size 32 through 38 and every one in between. As a result of having to make and have so much inventory, the money would always run thin. To stay afloat, the Kimes’s sold horse trailers, their trucks, prized saddles and other tack.

Matt even sold an old Lincoln Continental he had.

At the time, Amanda’s father worked in Alaska as an equipment broker. He would call them up, tell them he needed ABC tractor, XYZ hammer. They’d find what he needed and send it. Even while building their own brand, they constantly hustled on the side to put more money back into fledgling company.

As Amanda stated during one interview, “It’s a very humbling experience to ask your family and neighbors to invest in a brand that they don’t yet believe in”.

The couple had a few friends kind enough to lend them some money. Matt and Amanda are very proud of the fact that they paid every single person back, with interest, and on time.

Anything they could to keep the company and keep it going. To them, every single sale was a win.

The Fly Wheel Starts

This day-to-day struggle and grind went on for another 4 years.

They brought in some partners that didn’t work out well — even took them out of business for about a year. But at the end of that year, something they never expected happened…

The people that had the product and couldn’t get more of it…were missing it.

When they relaunched in 2014 it was with a new name — Kimes Ranch.

And people were waiting for them.

According to Matt and Amanda, from 2014 on, the company’s seen growth over growth over growth.

They were actually at a place where they could hire people. They hired a marketing director, a warehouse manager, and more. According to Amanda, they’ve always seen themselves as more, even during the hard years:

“We’ve always had this vision of being not just a western brand, but like a lifestyle brand that’s western-based and, and we’re reaching those audiences now six years on.”

They say it’s fun now.

It’s fun when people like your product and tell you they see it everywhere.

In the beginning, Matt and Amanda sold so few jeans, they used to know every person who bought a pair. If they saw someone wearing them they’d say, “oh, that’s Bill. He bought those a few months ago. But now people come to us all the time and say, ‘I see your stuff everywhere’”.

What they’re most proud of?

The fact it’s every day, average people that enjoy what they’re trying to do. The culture they’ve created, the product they’re putting out there. That people are proud to wear their brand.

That’s something you can always hang your hat on.

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📝Framework: The Power of Branding

I’ve ridden horses in Kimes Ranch’s Betty jeans for years now.

In my humble opinion, they hold up way better than other, more expensive brands, and don’t feel like if I bend over someone’s going to see way more of me than they should (or want to).

But I’ve always wondered — who is Betty?

And how did Kimes come up with a logo for jeans, that in the western world is just as recognizable as the Nike Swoosh? No words required.

I’m sitting here crying as I write this because I didn’t come up with it…but I digress.

This is where the genius of Kimes Ranch branding really shines.

Before Matt and Amanda married, they had another stellar idea to guarantee lifelong prosperity and contentment in their relationship. Get into the cattle business. More specifically, they were going to be cattle barons.

So what do you buy when you want to become a cattle baron?

A steer and a heifer.

Named…you might’ve guessed it…Barney and Betty.

Two Texas Longhorns.

Now it’s hard to make more cattle from a heifer and a steer. So Barney became a yard ornament, and Betty only lived a few years. According to the Kimes, she wasn’t very nice, but they still buried her on the ranch in honor of her singular contribution to the business. To this day, the Betty is still their No. 1 best-selling jeans for women.

RIP Betty.

As for Barney? He’s still living his best life at the ranch.

Anyway, they were going to run this giant herd of cattle.

In one of his sketchbooks, Matt had doodled out a rough draft of what eventually turned into their now-famous logo. So when they were trying to come up with a logo for the jean business, Amanda found Matt’s sketch and told him she liked it. Matt taught himself Adobe Illustrator, smoothed the edges out, and the rest is history.

The hardest part?

Coming up with a company name.

Taking a page out of Prince and Nike’s playbook, they liked having just the logo; a symbol, to represent their new brand.

But they knew they had to call themselves something to put on the legal papers.

The first iteration was Longhorn Jean Company — because what else are you supposed to call a pair of jeans?

However, a few months and one letter from Texas University later, that was nixed. Their attorney told them they could edit it, but it would cost them around $250,000. They went with LJC Apparel.

For a short time the name was Lone Horn Apparel, which they both admit was dumb. But both Matt and Amanda felt it was pretentious to put their own name on their company. At the insistence of their newly hired marketing director, she said they needed to use their own name.

They got over their initial embarrassment and here we are.

Today, Kimes Ranch averages over $15M in revenue per year, and their logo is one of the most recognizable in the western industry.

They understood the power of simplicity, and the fact that if you want people to associate you with your brand, you have to put your identity out there.

It’s why businesses who put their founder’s faces on their social media profiles, websites, podcast artwork, do SO much better than the so-called “Faceless Brands”.

It also offers a level of relatability and trust you can’t replicate without that human-to-human visual.

How You Can Replicate Some of Kimes Success

Matt and Amanda Kimes’s story is one of my favorites. While they don’t have millions of followers on social media like many other “top” creators do, they don’t need all that.

They just need a core group of valuable people in their audience to make a great and honest living.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity

It can be easy to look at someone with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and think you need to have a huge email list to be successful.

But that’s not the case at all.

If you have a highly targeted and valuable audience, you don’t need hundreds of thousands of subscribers. You only need a few thousand to make a living that affords you the freedoms you desire.

Do the Thing You Want to Be Known For

Instead of going the more straightforward route of starting a clothing company that offered all the things, Kimes decided to just focus on one thing — making the best riding jean that was different from anything else on the market at the time.

And it’s paid off. People (including myself) still love the Kimes Ranch brand and are fiercely loyal to it.

Is there something you want to be known for but don’t have much experience?

Become the researcher.

That’s how I got started with Western Writing Weekly. I was curious how people were growing their newsletters and rural businesses, and since I didn’t know many people doing this in the industry, I just started researching.

I compiled that research and now people feel like I’m an expert (even though I’m just researching the work of others).

Let yourself “play” around and experiment with the content you’re creating. It just might turn into your full-time “job.”

Don’t Be Afraid to Try Things

Matt and Amanda Kimes knew nothing about how to make jeans, or how to start and scale a clothing company when they started in March 2009.

They started their company at the height of the Great Recession, when consumers and businesses alike were struggling financially, and no one wanted to invest in startups.

In 2013, they had to shut it all down for a year.

They could’ve used all those setbacks as excuses to quit.

Yet they never stopped believing that one day their brand would be a household name in the western clothing industry. And that they would build it in such a way that made them proud and able to give back to the community that got them started.

With a dream, a roll of denim, and an internet connection, they just got started. Remember the world’s worst pair of jeans? **

When you first get started, you learn much faster what you can do better than if you just try and fail, and try again, rather than thinking you need to have it all figured out and perfect ahead of time.

Thankfully, this is the internet, and we can make changes as we go. If you’ve been holding back on starting something, why not give it a try?

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✍️Writing Prompt:

What are 3 ways you can be more authentic in your business in 2025?

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🗨️One quote to finish your week strong:

"Words don’t get written from a heart that’s never felt."

• Unknown

Everyone has a story to tell. If you’re human and have felt something, you have words you can (and should) write. Don’t be the reason someone doesn’t get to hear them.

See you next week!

Enjoy the ride,

Charlie

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