A Merchant, a Spreadsheet, and Several Thousand Pairs of Boots
There is a particular kind of executive who arrives at a meeting having already checked the numbers themselves, which is a polite way of saying they have made everyone else's slides redundant. Krista Dalton is that executive. As Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Tecovas, the Austin-based western wear company, she oversees the brand, the website, the ads, and a great deal of the arithmetic underneath all three. She has said plainly that she still wants to see the data herself and play with it herself, because she needs to know it in meetings off the top of her head. This is either admirable rigour or a mild inability to delegate. In retail, the two are frequently indistinguishable.
Her route to a boot company was not obvious. She went to Punahou School in Honolulu and then to the University of Michigan, where she took a BA in English and Classical Archaeology. It is a degree combination that prepares a person to read a difficult text closely and to work out what an object meant to the people who owned it. Anyone who has watched a merchandiser stare at a sell-through report will recognise both skills immediately.
She joined Target and stayed nine years. She began as an allocator in plus-size women's clothing and maternity wear, which is roughly the retail equivalent of starting in the mailroom, except with more spreadsheets and considerably tighter margins. On her first day, aged twenty-three, she built herself a calculator to track contribution and gross margin. Most twenty-three-year-olds spend their first day locating the coffee machine. She spent hers working out how the money moved.
In 2013 Target needed someone to move from the stores organisation into Target.com. No one had done it before. Dalton went first. There is a particular loneliness to being the first transfer in a large company - no template, no predecessor to blame, and colleagues on both sides quietly waiting to see whether you sink. She did not. She later held a senior merchandising role on the dotcom side focused on inventory strategy, which is the unglamorous discipline of making sure the thing people want to buy is actually in the building.
Overstock.com came next, and stayed for seven years. She served as VP of Private Label and Vendor Management, where an overhaul of the private label portfolio contributed to a 13 percent sales increase, and finished as Chief Customer Experience and Merchandising Officer, running more than 1,300 people and a P&L north of $800 million. It is a job description that reads like a summit. It is also, one suspects, a job in which the pleasure of individual products gets slowly crushed under the weight of quarterly reporting.
In 2023 she moved to Austin and joined Tecovas, a company that sells handmade western boots and had grown from a direct-to-consumer upstart into a chain of physical stores. It now has more than fifty locations. The role has since expanded into the double-barrelled Chief Marketing and Digital Officer, which is two C-suite jobs stapled together and probably explains the AI agent.
Her governing rule for growth is that a brand should only enter categories it has a genuine right to occupy. Everyone says this. Very few can explain what evidence would settle the question. Dalton can, because her team went and got some. They practised what they call closeting: visiting customers' homes and going through their actual wardrobes. Not surveys about what people say they wear. The wardrobe. The shelf. The scuffed pair by the back door.
What emerged was that work boots were a natural extension of a comfort promise Tecovas had already made. The category launched in late 2024, and more than 60 percent of the new customers it brought in had never owned a pair of cowboy boots in their lives. Women's work boots followed. The insight was not a hunch dressed up as strategy. It was a wardrobe.
Marketers have spent a decade arguing about whether brand advertising works, using attribution models that mostly reflect the preferences of whoever built them. Dalton's team took a blunter approach: they switched television off for two months and watched what happened.
What happened was that return on ad spend across the lower-funnel channels fell. Not immediately, which was the useful part - the lag revealed a customer acquisition cycle running six to eight weeks. No dashboard had made that visible. Turning the tap off did. It is worth noting how much nerve this requires. Pausing television spend is the marketing equivalent of unplugging the machine to see whether the patient was ever attached to it, and if the numbers had gone the other way, the meeting afterwards would have been memorable for the wrong reasons.
The rest of the media approach is similarly evidence-led. For the work boots launch her team tested more than fifty creative variations and found that awareness-led creative outperformed direct response. Fifteen-second TikToks beat thirty-two-second ones, which surprised nobody under thirty and quite a few people over fifty. All the assets for the campaign - email, social, homepage, paid - were shot across a single three-day session, so the brand arrived everywhere at once looking like one brand rather than five committees. And a partnership with the television series Landman, plus a spot during a Chiefs game, produced a sixteenfold spike in searches for “Tecovas near me.” That is a rare thing in modern advertising: a number nobody has to squint at.
Dalton built a custom AI agent to handle the roughly sixteen reports she had been reading by hand every week. It surfaces the top-line numbers, the trends, the things worth a second look. Then she spent months not trusting it. “I didn't trust the numbers,” she has said. “I knew about hallucinations. I knew that numbers weren't the jam of most AI, so it took a while for me to gain trust.”
She describes herself as AI old-school, which she defines as about three months old - a joke that will date faster than anything else on this page. Her position is that AI earns its keep during research and scoping, and has no business making the final call on what product gets made. An inventory partnership with invent.ai produced a 2 percent improvement in stock availability and a 20 percent lift in new product sales, which is what the technology looks like when it is pointed at something boring and quantifiable rather than at a creative brief.
When Footwear News named her to its Women Who Rock class of 2026, honoured at an event in New York on 3 June, she gave the crispest summary of her method anyone has managed: “I'm doubling down on the balance of art and science. On the science side, I'm arming myself with AI for analytics and attribution. However, the most critical leadership skill today is 'originality protection.' While many use AI to move faster, we use it to move smarter - speeding up analysis without replacing the human fingerprint on our craft.” Originality protection is a phrase worth stealing, and by the end of this year several dozen people will have.
Two stories give the measure of her. The first: driving home from South by Southwest, she overheard a construction worker asking about Tecovas work boots. No dashboard delivered that. It arrived through an open window, in traffic, from a stranger who had no idea he was the most valuable data point of the quarter.
The second: she found out one of her ads had gone viral by receiving a direct message about it, at a moment when her own account had roughly seven followers and no profile picture. She has cheerfully described herself as a creepy lurker. It is a useful corrective to a genre of executive who treats a personal follower count as a professional qualification. The boots were selling. The follower count was seven. One of these facts mattered.
The line about the West is the closest she comes to romance, and even then it is doing strategic work. Tecovas is not selling a costume. It is selling a set of associations - competence, durability, a willingness to stop - and Dalton knows the associations only hold if the product does. Her other favourite observation, that if you break down at the side of the road the person who stops to help will be wearing cowboy boots, is either a marketing insight or a statement about American character. She appears content to let it be both.
Her advice to young women entering the industry is to master what she calls the un-obvious: learn the P&L if you sit in creative, learn storytelling if you sit in data. It is advice that describes her own career precisely - a woman with an archaeology degree who built a margin calculator at twenty-three and now runs both the brand and the numbers behind it. The obvious skills are already crowded. The un-obvious ones are where the leverage is hiding.
She has spoken at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW in 2025 and again in 2026, and spent ninety-seven minutes on the Marketing Operators podcast discussing reporting and merchandising, which is either a marathon or a public service depending on your interests. Roughly 40 percent of existing Tecovas customers own six or more pairs of boots, a statistic that says a great deal about the customer and something about the person whose job it is to sell them a seventh.
Marketing has never been short of people willing to describe the future. It has been rather short of people willing to unplug the television for two months and write down what happened. Dalton did that, published the finding, and moved on to the next question. In an industry that mostly runs on conviction, she runs on evidence - and on a healthy suspicion of any number she has not personally poked with a stick.