Reginald Murray Williams started making boots in 1932, in a shed, in South Australia, with hand tools and a technique he had learned from a bushman named Dollar Mick. The product that came out of that shed was defined by a single manufacturing decision: the upper was cut from one piece of leather, which meant fewer seams, which meant a boot that survived being worn every day by men who had nowhere to go and buy another one. That is the founding story, it is genuinely charming, and it is the least useful part of the history for anybody running a business today.
The useful part is what happened after the shed. A company built on a craft constraint spent the following decades discovering what the craft was actually worth, which is a different question from what the craft is. RM Williams grew into a national brand, then a listed one, then an asset passed between owners who each had a theory about it. Ownership moved offshore when a majority stake went to the luxury group LVMH’s investment arm L Catterton in 2013, and in 2020 it came back, bought by Andrew Forrest’s Tattarang, who committed to Australian manufacturing and to the Adelaide workshop where the boots are still made.
The espresso analogy is almost exact, and anyone who has watched a good café chain expand will recognise it. The thing being sold is not coffee. It is consistency, and consistency comes from a specific set of constraints a founder usually imposes without articulating them: this roaster, this dose, this ten-second window before the shot is discarded. Scale a café and every one of those constraints looks like a cost. Each is individually defensible to relax. Cheaper beans will not be noticed on a Tuesday. A longer window raises throughput. Nothing fails. The brand simply becomes a logo on a cup, worth whatever marketing can make it worth rather than whatever the product can, and the customer who came for the first thing stops being able to tell the difference between you and anyone else.
That is the pattern RM Williams lived through and then reversed, and the reversal is the achievement. A brand whose entire equity sat in a manufacturing method was, at various points, run by owners for whom the manufacturing method was a line item and the brand was the asset. The boots became a licence to sell belts, bags, clothing and the general idea of the outback, which is a perfectly good business and a completely different one. What Tattarang bought back in 2020, and what the commitment to keep making boots in Adelaide actually purchases, is the ability for the claim to be literally true. A heritage brand that still makes the heritage product has something no amount of campaign spend can manufacture, which is the right to say so without a lawyer checking the wording.
There is a hard operating lesson underneath the romance. Brand equity built on a method cannot be separated from the method and still hold its value, however attractive the margin arithmetic looks on the day somebody proposes it. The founder’s constraints are not sentiment. They are the product specification, and they survive scale only if someone with authority defends them against the entirely reasonable people whose job is to make the numbers better this quarter. RM Williams got that person back, nine decades after the shed, which is why the boots are still the thing rather than the memory of the thing.
Williams himself died in 2003, having been a drover, a well-sinker, a publisher and a bootmaker, which is roughly three more careers than most people manage. The shed is the anecdote. The single-piece upper is the business.
Source: NeTT Business News, “RM Williams: the bushman’s boot empire”
