WSJ - When Lee Miller started apprenticing 35 years ago in Austin, Texas, his mentor, legendary boot maker Charlie Dunn, said to him, "You're a damn Yankee, but I won't hold that against you."
Mr. Miller, 57, whose intricately decorated custom-made boots have been worn by Texas luminaries such as Lyle Lovett, Tommy Lee Jones and Willie Nelson, hails from Rutland, Vt. He works with his wife Carrlyn, two assistants and his white American Eskimo dog Sweetie in an Austin workshop tucked next to a fried chicken restaurant and a Catholic church.
Lee Miller's intricately decorated custom-made boots are adored by celebrities and fans willing to wait four years and shell out up to $8,500 per pair. But the secret to his success, he says, is getting the perfect fit.
There's a four-year waitlist, and he's not accepting new clients. Each of his pairs, which start at $1,900 but can run to $8,500, takes at least 40 hours to make. The economic downturn slowed business a bit; he has a few pairs of "bankruptcy boots"—completed boots that customers can't pay for.
Bootmaking involves hundreds of intricate measurements and steps. "It's kind of like making a sandwich," said Mr. Miller. "You have all these different parts and you have to put them together."
Clients, who come from all over the world and are about 80% male, sit on a wooden thronelike chair in Mr. Miller's office for about 20 minutes of measurements—eight for each foot. He then takes an ink impression of customers' soles. Doing so allows him to "read the foot," helping him to determine where the metatarsal bones jut out, how wide the heel should be, how much wiggle room to allow for the toes and how to fit the arch. He scribbles the measurements in pen and draws a side profile of the foot, illustrating any bunions or odd shapes on a manila folder.
Little is digitized. Inside the cramped workshop, Mr. Miller and his team use rusting vintage leather-cutters and sewing machines to stitch together the boots and create the fancy embroidery and inlays. Some of his equipment and tools date back to the 1910s, 20s and 30s. The oldest piece of equipment, a side-seam stitcher, is from about 1910. He uses his own sketches as templates and still has most of the boot patterns sketched by his mentor Mr. Dunn.
A lot of the hand tools he uses haven't changed for about a century, he said, so he hasn't felt any need to buy new ones. Although he could automate more processes in his workshop, he said that he made a conscious choice not to. "No automated machine can do as fine work as the human hand can." Plus, customers enjoy the old-school feel of his workshop.
The past informs his ideas, too. He regularly studies antique bootmaking books and manuals from the 19th century and early 20th century, and he seeks out aging bootmakers at bootmaking conventions, seeking to borrow and preserve their techniques.
Mr. Miller's wife, Carrlyn, works with clients to decide on color, pattern and choice of leather, while Mr. Miller sketches ideas for boot tops with colored pencils on brown craft paper.
He'll sometimes mull sketch ideas for days and said that he is constantly thinking about designs (often over long evening runs). "I get inspiration from everything that I see—things like a water glass. You might see a pretty pattern, wallpaper, tapestries, old books."
These days many of his clients are into vintage patterns from the 1930s. Some like to have their names or initials worked into the boot tops. Others choose roses, barbed wire or—Mr. Miller's specialty—tulips, which are almost Art Nouveau in appearance.
Each client gets his own last, a molded plastic and leather model of a boot form, around which Mr. Miller shapes the boot. "The intricacies of the foot are represented in that form," he said. Hundreds of lasts hang from the ceiling of Mr. Miller's workshop. He stretches the leather around the last to give the boot its shape and to make sure it retains its fit after years of wear. He and his team then follow the design, embroidering the boot tops according to the sketch and shaping the boot to fit its wearer.
"I am definitely thinking about who I am making it for," he said, especially because many clients choose designs with deep personal meaning, such as an image of the house they grew up in. "Boots are sculpture you can wear."
The bootmakers sit at benches on rolling exercise-ball chairs. A small stereo plays classic country, classical music or, to his annoyance, comedy radio. "My assistants love it, but it drives me crazy," he said.
Mr. Miller grew up surrounded by footwear; his merchant grandfather owned a clothing and shoe store in Rutland. "When I turned 18, this is what I wanted to do," he said.
While a teen in Rutland, he heard a cassette of the Jerry Jeff Walker country song "Charlie Dunn," about the Texas bootmaker. He soon left Vermont to study bootmaking at a trade school in rural Oklahoma. A few years later, in 1977, Mr. Miller began apprenticing in Mr. Dunn's workshop thanks to a friend of a friend. Mr. Miller was 23 years old; Mr. Dunn, 79.
Mr. Dunn died in 1993 at age 95, after retiring at 88. Mr. Miller plans on working "as long as I can," he said. "I have no plans to never not do this."